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Does all the content just evaporate or what?

How long does the public beta last? At present we are only at 180 daily visits, what happens if we don't have a nice 1500 visitors (as seems to be a required amount) after the public beta period ends?

from area51:

1,500 visits per day is good, 500 visits per day needs some work. A great site benefits people outside the community. Eventually, 90% of a site's traffic should come from search engines.

Would be a shame to see this just vanish.

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  • $\begingroup$ it's currently over 300, so it looks like it's heading in the desired direction! $\endgroup$
    – zeffii
    Commented Jun 7, 2013 at 10:24

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From When Will My Site Graduate?:

How long can a site stay in beta?

The simple answer is, it takes as long as it takes. We’ll wait. If a site needs more activity, go out and evangelize it. As long as your site shows steady progress and continues to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it will march on. We don’t want to kill a site because it hasn’t reached full status in 90 days. Nor do we want to set a hard 90-day limit and launch a site too soon.

We'll generally only close a site when it has become clear that it is dying - if you're growing, even slowly, you have little to worry about. (And even when we do close sites, the data is made public so that you can take your work with you)

So far, Blender.SE is doing very nicely.

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  • $\begingroup$ thanks for the concise answer, i'd love to get hold of the current site stats as json is that possible? $\endgroup$
    – zeffii
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 17:12
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Expanding on Yu Asakusa's answer..

This is something that happens over time, some sites have been in public beta for months and longer, we haven't been up for 2 weeks yet. We also already have alot of content and our userbase is expanding nicely, 300 users so far. I wouldn't worry about it too much as we have already been planning ways on promoting the site. See How do we promote our site? and Migrating Blender related questions from other SE sites?.

However, as an answer to your question, if we don't get enough content or our visits stay low and or users are inactive, there is a high possibility that the site will be closed, but as I said, so far its early and the site has alot of potential. Also, one factor isn't really enough to determine the fate of a site, it usually is based on several or more problems. We will graduate when the community moderators deem us ready.

See How can we ensure Blender.SE doesn't share 3DGraphics.SE's fate?

On a more positive note, we are well ahead of the other site that was closed. The stats look pretty good to me so far.

Here is where we would be in trouble.

enter image description here

We are already way past where they were closed so our stats are pretty ok at the moment.

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  • $\begingroup$ 29 visits per day. o.O $\endgroup$
    – Daniel
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 16:01
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    $\begingroup$ It's a shame 3D Graphics didn't survive that beta, the premise was (and still is) brilliant. With a potential to be the rosetta stone of 3d software. $\endgroup$
    – zeffii
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 16:44
  • $\begingroup$ @zeffii see meta.blender.stackexchange.com/questions/77/… $\endgroup$
    – iKlsR
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 16:48
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    $\begingroup$ @Dan the Man: To be fair, according to the Area 51 page, 3D Graphics was in private beta for its whole life, so it is understandable that the average number of visits was low. I do not know why it did not become public beta. Anyway it is unfortunate it did not grow into a great Q&A website. $\endgroup$
    – Yu Asakusa
    Commented Jun 3, 2013 at 4:53
  • $\begingroup$ Months? Sometimes that can be years. It took about 21 months for Christianity.SE to graduate. So, don't despair if it seems like it'll take many months before graduation; that's actually kinda normal. $\endgroup$
    – El'endia Starman
    Commented Jun 6, 2013 at 17:41
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The site graduates the beta when it is ready. Graduation from the beta is not judged by a single metric, and I do not know if 1500 visitors per day is a must.

But if the administrators at Stack Exchange Inc. decide the site is not likely to become ready to graduate in the foreseeable future, they will close the site. In that case, the content of the site (data dump) will be available for download at the Area 51 page for possible reuse. For example, see the page of 3D Graphics Stack Exchange. Other than the data dump, the site will indeed vanish unless someone revives the content from the data dump.

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    $\begingroup$ thanks for your answer, if it results in a datadump at least I will have some interesting data to visualize with d3.js on a rainy day. $\endgroup$
    – zeffii
    Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 15:45

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