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It's well worth reading Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites but if you haven't got time:

The TL;DR:

  1. When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation.
  2. If a public beta site does not produce consistently helpful content, and lacks the caretakers needed for flags and spam to get handled and our Be Nice policy to be upheld, it will be closed.

Is your site in between these two categories? You don’t have anything to worry about. Regardless of how small the site might be, you have a home here in the SE network. Spoiler alert: As of this post, no site which is currently active is at risk of being shut down.

There are discussions there about what it means in practice for smaller sites like ourselves, and links in some of the answers to discussions about whether some limited customisation of beta site appearance might be possible, so if that matters to you, you might want to participate there.

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I'd hoped the announcement I made on Meta Stack Exchange would give this community, in particular, some peace of mind. Genealogy SE's experiences helped inform the Community Team's updated policy on small sites.

PolyGeo's final words put it pretty nicely:

At the same time we now have more freedom to maintain/raise the bar on question quality rather than needing to further assess how far we should lower it.

Go forth and keep being awesome!

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I think it is great to see that post which reinforces the answer that @Ana gave to Helping Genealogy & Family History to graduate Beta sooner rather than later?

It's like now knowing not only that we have a safety net, but also that it does not have any gaping holes in it.

Despite knowing that we are here to stay, I would still like to strive for graduation via eventually lifting our questions per day to 10+ because:

  • that will put our site in the running to get a makeover with genealogy and family history inspired artwork to be proud of, and to make us more attractive to new users
  • opening the site each day and seeing 10+ new questions to choose from to read or answer will make it far more engaging than it is now on the frequent days where we have none.

It is great to be free from the shackles of trying to reach 5 questions per day "at all costs" or to "save our skins" but I think keeping the new target of 10 questions per day in our sights will, over time, help to engender further pride in our site and attract a significantly (but not massively) wider and more vibrant community to share our passion for Genealogy and Family History.

At the same time we now have more freedom to maintain/raise the bar on question quality rather than needing to further assess how far we should lower it.

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