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The site has been up for almost more than 2 years.

All statistics seems to be reasonably good. The flow of good questions and answers seems to be steady. The need for the site is also clear. There is an active community of high rep users around the site. So naturally I am wondering about when will CS.SE graduate. Is there something else that holds back CS.SE from graduating?

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    $\begingroup$ See also this older question that never got a staff reply. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Commented Oct 23, 2013 at 19:39
  • $\begingroup$ dont know. would also like to know. "questions per day" on area51 stats has not been so high for long. also, se mgt has stated they're interested in overall pageviews on the site, which is not reported publicly(?). have heard that se sites are not graduating as frequently. is there a list of recently graduated sites? $\endgroup$
    – vzn
    Commented Oct 23, 2013 at 21:55
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    $\begingroup$ "What's holding it back?" Me being a slacker and sitting on the eval for two months. Thanks for the reminder... $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Oct 24, 2013 at 1:16
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    $\begingroup$ @Shog9, so we are going to hear from you soon? :) $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Commented Oct 24, 2013 at 1:50
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    $\begingroup$ yeah, one way or t'other. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Oct 24, 2013 at 3:01
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    $\begingroup$ FWIW, this is still in the graduation queue - designers are paying down some technical debt right now, with the goal of clearing out some of the backlog a bit faster going forward. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 5, 2014 at 21:38
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks Shog9 for the update. (I saw your last comment.) $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Commented Aug 5, 2014 at 22:14
  • $\begingroup$ can imagine/ guess your reasons, but my question to you is, why do you want it to graduate? functionally there seems not a huge difference... fyi there is some ref to a graduation queue/backlog by gracenote $\endgroup$
    – vzn
    Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 15:08

2 Answers 2

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When it's ready.

To be clear: this site is doing very well so far. Not just by the numbers, but in how the folks here conduct themselves and handle increasing amounts of traffic (as we've seen over the past couple of months with the start of the school year). I've written a bit more about this here.

So what are we waiting for?

So from this point forward, the graduation date of a site will depend heavily on having enough users with sufficient reputation to properly lead and govern the site. It’s much more important to graduate a site when it has become self-sustaining, and has established a healthy community of avid users, closers, and editors — rather than imposing an arbitrary 90-day limit.

-- When Will My Site Graduate?

As I said, there's been a notable uptick in activity over the past few months. Here's a graph of questions from new users over the past year and a half:

first questions by month

As you can see, last year caught a nice little bump in October - this year, that kicked off in September. Folks are having a much easier time finding this site, and... They're making the most of it. That's awesome - but it also means y'all have a lot more new folks around, and the distribution of reputation (and associated privilege) is a little bit skewed.

Assuming you have no major problems handling the traffic and associated new-user problems (potential drop in the quality of Q&A, etc), I see no reason why this site couldn't graduate in the near future. You'll get the chance to do some more introspection in a few weeks, and we'll talk over the results here at SE.

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for your answer, it's much appreciated! And, of course, I'm very happy to see that this baby is growing up. However, and you must tire of hearing this, it's effing about time that the highlighted stats on beta sites and Area51 reflect what counts. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Commented Nov 2, 2013 at 10:24
  • $\begingroup$ Have there been any new developments or issues? $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Commented Jan 7, 2014 at 9:57
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    $\begingroup$ See my comment on the last self-eval, @Raphael. We have a pretty serious backlog internally for graduations right now, but there's nothing here that would hold things up at present - keep on doing what you're doing! $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Jan 7, 2014 at 19:31
  • $\begingroup$ I had not seen that comment, thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Commented Jan 8, 2014 at 8:33
  • $\begingroup$ Any news or progress? How far are we from the top of the queue? Can we do anything to help? (I think you might need to hire more designers if that's indeed the bottle-neck.) $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Commented Sep 23, 2014 at 6:50
  • $\begingroup$ Still stuck in the queue, @Raphael. If you know anyone good, we are looking for another designer... $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Sep 30, 2014 at 19:01
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    $\begingroup$ It's been three years now and no news. Or are there? Apparently you do now graduate without waiting for the designers (that's great!) so can we expect graduation in the near future? (By the way, I am confused as to why a site that has been founded less than a year before we were told we would graduate (and is quite a bit smaller) has overtaken us in the queue.) $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Commented Mar 18, 2015 at 11:46
  • $\begingroup$ Yeah, we're experimenting with a different workflow there @Raphael - if it works out, maybe we can drop this notion of a "backlog" permanently. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Commented Mar 18, 2015 at 18:52
  • $\begingroup$ Let's hope so, good luck! $\endgroup$
    – Raphael Mod
    Commented Mar 18, 2015 at 22:07
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We are in the process of graduating now:

Congratulations! Computer Science is graduating!

When this process will conclude (with a custom design and adjusted privilege levels) is still unclear.

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