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We recently went into public beta and while it's a big step, we need to look at our next step in the journey of Language Learning: graduation.

While the period between public beta and graduation is a potentially long time (more than a year, sometimes up to 5!), we should take a look at how we plan to achieve the goals needed for graduation.

Site health

There is a bunch of factors required before a site can graduate:

  • Questions per day (Area 51 suggests 10/day)
  • Answered percentage (Area 51 suggests 90%)
  • Answer ratio (Area 51 suggests 2.5)
  • Users

In order for us to be on track to graduating, we should work on meeting these site factors.

How are we doing?

After the private beta started, site traffic was doing pretty well, however, nearly a week after that point, site traffic started declining:

Questions per day:

graph

SEDE link here

Users per day:

graph

SEDE link here

From these two graphs, you can see that site engagement and participation is dropping. While it naturally makes sense that participation would drop after the initial few days of Private beta, it's still not good.

What can we do?

Immediately, we can work on improving our "answered percentages":

and our Answers per question ratio:

After that, we should work on boosting our community's content, friendliness and userbase, via work like:

  • Leaving helpful and positive comments on off-topic or "needs work" questions.
  • Community ads for other sites
  • Working together to burninate and cleanup tag usage.

We can work toward improving our Questions per day as new users sign up:

Together, and only together, we can make Language Learning into a great place.

Let's work together to make that a reality.

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  • Thanks for posting this, we need to work together on these goals
    – fi12
    May 8, 2016 at 12:17
  • In the first graph, where is the line for "10 Questions/day"? I don't see one (in Red). Also graphing both /week and /day with a 3 day scale isn't so helpful. Maybe needs revision?
    – user3169
    May 8, 2016 at 15:12
  • @user3169 10 questions per day is a constant rate, which can be converted to a weekly rate (70 questions per week). And the line is the solid constant red line
    – Quill
    May 8, 2016 at 20:20
  • I see, the "rate" is a goal, right? It looks like there are only 3 data points so far. The data points should match the X axis scale. Also, what is the meaning of the data at Apr 09?
    – user3169
    May 8, 2016 at 21:37
  • @user3169 all sites go through Area 51 before going into a private beta, April 9th was the first day of the private beta.
    – Quill
    May 8, 2016 at 22:35
  • I know that, but what does the activity shown (100, 140) mean in relation to the other data?
    – user3169
    May 9, 2016 at 0:14
  • @user3169 it shows that the activity rate dropped heavily after the start of the private beta.
    – Quill
    May 9, 2016 at 0:15
  • While the users per day is an interesting measurement, Area 51 goals are about the sum of users. So you should plot the accumulated graph instead.
    – clem steredenn
    May 9, 2016 at 7:26
  • Area 51 goals are about both types of data, the sum of users is harder to plot on a graph in relation to A51's guides
    – Quill
    May 9, 2016 at 7:30
  • Oh wait, I misunderstood what users meant... or did I? Area 51 asked for a number of vistitors per day, and a group of core users. Which one did you mean?
    – clem steredenn
    May 9, 2016 at 13:30
  • The graph shows all users joined per day @bilbo_pingouin
    – Quill
    May 9, 2016 at 14:03
  • Area 51 is asking for 150 users with 200+ rep, 10 with 2000+ and 2 with 3000+. But never for how many new users per day. So I'm not sure of its use.
    – clem steredenn
    May 9, 2016 at 14:16
  • Users per day isn't a metric that Area 51 says should be at a certain point, it's just easier to use toward showing the progress of the site than mapping the expected users-at-rep points
    – Quill
    May 9, 2016 at 15:09
  • Questions and answers on our site tend to be more complex and require more time to answer. There also seem to just be many variations of the same questions.
    – LN6595
    May 10, 2016 at 20:04
  • I suspect that there was a spike of activity on the first day of the private beta, because of pre-existing questions people wanted to ask, which would explain the downward trend in the first graph. Nothing to worry about.
    – Andrew Grimm
    May 22, 2016 at 2:06

2 Answers 2

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Honestly, I think the best thing we can do for this site right now is to ask quality questions. By doing this, we can reach the 10 questions/day goal. Not only that, good questions inspire good answers, which will increase site participation. There's also the chance that a really active question could be featured on the Hot Network Questions sidebar, which could make us see in increase in traffic from other SE sites (more activity is good!).

If you are one of those people who doesn't have too many questions, then answer as many of the unanswered questions as possible. Not only does this provide helpful information to the OP, it also bumps up the old, forgotten, unanswered question to the topic of the questions list, increasing the chance someone else might answer/see it.

Once we've gotten past these initial hurdles in site participation and activity, I have no doubt we can be where we want to be.

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  • 1
    Here is the list of unanswered questions, ranked by number of votes.
    – Ooker
    May 9, 2016 at 6:46
  • 1
    Also, something to keep in mind that the only thing that the CMs consider for a site to graduate is having a constant 10 question/day. If we can reach that metric, we should be ready to graduate.
    – fi12
    Jun 22, 2016 at 1:17
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I think that we should be less strict towards new users questions and ask them to clarify their questions before closing them.

I have seen many questions to be closed even before the user has replied to the comments. Also avoid downvoting new users. Low quality should be closed. But waiting for a new user to respond, and not downvoting until he does so may attract new users to this site.

By new users I mean those who are new to SE network itself.

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