What happens now?

Question

Writers.SE is passed it's 90 days in beta. So what happens now? It doesn't look like we're quite up to par yet, but we've got 2 Excellents out of 5.

Answer 1

There are three minimum requirements before a site can qualify for graduation:

• +90 days in beta
• Enough voting to create 10 Editors (users with +2,000 rep)
• Enough voting to create 5 Closers (users with +3,000 rep)

Writers SE Curent Stats

           Minimum    Current
Editors    10         2 users
Closers    5          0 users

So we've got some work to do. But that's okay. If you read the blog post about graduating sites: When Will My Site Graduate?, it says essentially that, as long as you continue to make progress, we'll wait for as long as it takes.

If you look at that blog post, you'll notice that your stats are very, very similar to the GIS site just a few months ago. And now GIS set to graduate in a couple of weeks.

So what do these statistics mean?

There are two notable areas for improvement:

Avid Users

There are very few users with more than 2,000 reputation. That means simply that the community is not voting enough. That is completely within your control. You get 30 votes per day. Use your votes!

Only ~28% of this site's traffic comes from search engines. A successful site gets about 60-90% of its traffic from search. That means that users are not finding this site. The best way to tell people about this site is to link to interesting questions. Most of the network's largest spikes in traffic were due to linking and passing on interesting questions! Use those social bookmarking tools!

Your saving grace is having 98% of questions answered. That's fantastic! All those other statistics will come when you create steady, organic growth. Don't worry about forcing those statistics higher. They'll take care of themselves so long as you're growing.

Work on your participation (voting, asking great questions, and spreading the word) and the other statistics will come naturally.