Today, 59 Stack Exchange sites that originated in Area 51 lose their beta labels. 🎉
Until now, shedding the beta label was a complex process, involving specific benchmarks and a significant resource investment from our Product team. Recently, however, we revisited the requirements for leaving beta, and our Public Platform team built tooling that enables Community Managers to update a site’s status without a developer. You can read more about that process on Meta.
To mark the milestone, we asked community moderators how it feels to leave beta, and we’re giving a celebratory shoutout to all 58 sites leaving beta today.
Stack Overflow in Japanese (this community is also celebrating its seventh anniversary!)
“We are so excited to lose the beta label on the site’s seven-year anniversary! All arigato go to every single one of the users who posted, edited, voted, commented, reviewed, and performed other actions. Our community has been dedicated to providing a high-quality library of questions and answers around programming in Japanese!” —Aki, Language Community Contractor
“Losing the beta label is a recognition for the job we have been doing to make this community a great place for people interested in AI.” —Nbro, Moderator
“I'm grateful to SE for hosting the site and for devising the whole format—Q&A, Meta, moderators, and so on—and grateful to users of the site who posted so much: reference material, personalised answers to specific doubts or uncertainties, and topics I didn't even know existed.” —Chris W., Moderator
“DevOps SE being promoted from beta is a huge step for the community, and creates a great opportunity to establish the site as the internet’s home of Q/A for DevOps engineers around the world.” —PrestonMartin, Moderator
“We want to take the time to thank everyone who has put their time into making this site a great resource for genealogists and family historians, and a great community to interact with. This wouldn't be happening without all your hard work over the last nine years!” —PolyGeo, Moderator
“The Pets community is not at all Koi to oh-fish-ially leave the Betta label behind.”
“The Pets community is not at all Koi to oh-fish-ially leave the Betta label behind. Puns aside, our focus has always been on improving the life of all kinds of pets and their human companions. Over the past years, we not only shared insights into the most common behavioral problems, but we also tackled unique challenges in the care of individual pets and even prepared scientific and veterinary knowledge to be easily understandable. We appreciate the recognition for these efforts as it encourages us to continue helping people and their pets alike.” —Elmy, Moderator
“Since the proposal in 2013, our site has steadily garnered interest and an influx of new community members... As with so many topics, when you search for reverse engineering topics, often a Q&A from our site will pop up in the search engine of your choice.” —0xC0000022L, Moderator
“As someone who has followed Space Exploration from Area 51 and having been a mod since the early days, through some really rough times, it is so rewarding to see the community finally leave beta.” —Called2Voyage, Moderator
“We are thrilled! We've invested a lot of time and effort here, and this is great news! Thanks a lot for recognizing our efforts and progress. It certainly means something! And we are extremely happy to provide help in learning Ukrainian both on our main site and meta (there are posts with very useful sources).” —P. Vowk, Moderator
“The Vi and Vim Stack Exchange site has had a very inspiring seven-year journey as the little SE that could. Starting out needing to go though the proposal phase twice due to the proposal not being understood at first. Vi & Vim went on showing throughout the beta that a community for Vi & Vim is not only viable, but can be approached in a friendly and welcoming way while keeping a high quality site.” —Dom, Moderator
Here are the other sites losing their beta labels today: