The Area 51 beta progress bar ends at 90 days. We're at 93 days, and our page says:
This site has finished its beta and will be launching very soon.
Why haven't we launched yet? What impact do the Area 51 metrics have on our launch? What do we need to do before we're ready to launch?
This somehow turned into a giant entry, so I split it into a few sections; it starts discussing the launch procedure and ends with me rambling about how voting is good and why we should vote more :)
The beta launch process was changed somewhat after the first few sites launched. Originally it boiled down to "at 90 days, either the site launches or it folds", and the first few sites all made the cut. However, they immediately ran into problems, so the process was changed. There are a bunch of useful metrics listed on our Area 51 page now:
Each of those is marked Worrying, Okay, or Excellent
As Robert (the community coordinator) said in the blog post:
the graduation date of a site will depend heavily on having enough users with sufficient reputation to properly lead and govern the site.
Users who haven't been on a launched SE site before may not realize that we're currently operating with greatly lowered reputation requirements. Most relevant to this post:
The reason for Area 51 emphasizing the number of users with 2k and 3k rep should be clear now -- those translate to the number of users who can edit and close posts, the two most important maintenance tasks. It takes 5 votes to close a post, so even if all our 3k users vote it won't be enough; a moderator needs to do it. Sites need to be able to self-police (edit and close posts without mods getting involved), so they won't launch until that happens.
We discussed beta launches at the network meeting this week. Jin (the SE designer) can design about 1-1.5 sites per week, so they can't really launch faster than that. We're told this is the current way site launches are ordered, in order of decreasing importance:
As of 10 Nov, the sites ready to launch were TeX, English Language and Usage, and Personal Finance and Money, and TeX actually did launch about six hours ago.
We're second of the other five 90+ day betas (first is Home Improvement) that aren't ready to launch yet -- we're missing sufficient high reputation users
This leads nicely into the last point:
People gain reputation through high quality posts, but they only do so if the posts are voted on. From what I've heard talking to mods on other sites, the sites that have gone on to launch averaged about 200 upvotes/day during the beta period. Last month we were averaging just over 100/day, and so far this month (through 10 Nov when I pulled the data) we've averaged about 55/day, despite having about the same question volume and an increased number of visits (the last four days have had more visits than any days since just after public beta started).
Votes do more than just affect reputation, they're used in lots of places. Off the top of my head, for questions:
For answers:
There's a good post on the Web Applications meta about when you should up/downvote. We each get 30 votes/day, which is almost exactly the number of posts/day we average, so running out isn't a big concern. As an added bonus, there are quite a few badges associated both with voting and receiving votes
