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Proposal: Drones and Model Aircraft

Going forward, I'm afraid this proposal is in a difficult spot. As is evident from the general support and self-reported demographics present on the proposal page, there is definitely an audience for a site like this.

The problem arises from the fact that since this community is fairly different in scope and intended audience in comparison to most other existing SE sites, we have only been able to recruit a little less than half of the required supporters with >200 reputation across the Stack Exchange platform.

Thus, my question is this: Could a large number of supporters help offset a <100 number of commiters with <200 rep? As of writing, this proposal is 329 supporters strong. What if any, bar would we have to reach in order to convince Stack Exchange that our community could be viable as a beta site?

I'm hoping from a response from @TimPost or one of the other Area51 mods here.

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    Why isn't reputation from other stack exchanges being included in Area 51? I have 2k+ rep on Stack Overflow and a couple of other exchanges. It seems a little burdensome to have 100 people who have 200+ rep on Area 51 only to qualify. I would be willing to bet that a majority of committers for this proposal have never been to any kind of stack exchange site. This makes it incredibly hard to get people new to stack exchange to get enough rep to meet the requirements.
    – Scott Lance
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 22:48
  • Hrm, that is odd, @ScottLance... It should be working. Maybe it'll spontaneously start again soon?
    – ifconfig
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 22:50
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    An alternative is to get users who have already committed to the proposal to go earn 200 reputation on a different site, and their commitment will also be automatically counted as one of the 100 required 200+ rep ones (provided their Area 51 account is in sync, of course). Plus it also gives them a bonus 100 rep on the site once it gets to beta.
    – damryfbfnetsi
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 22:51
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    @ScottLance That's likely an account problem. Contact Stack Exchange using the contact link at the bottom and they'll fix it for you: your participation on Stack Overflow should count for this purpose. Out of curiosity (I have a hunch as to one possible cause of the issue), did you change your email address at some point?
    – damryfbfnetsi
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 22:53
  • @damryfbfnesti On all stack exchange sites, I log in with the google social login. I've submitted a question to support.
    – Scott Lance
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 22:54
  • @ScottLance Looks like it just resumed counting y'all. :) We're up to 50/100.
    – ifconfig
    Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 3:11
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    Complete sidenote RIP is probably not a good link description for someone still living and well.
    – Jamiec
    Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 9:30
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    I had the same problem and it seems to be a bug of area51: Persistent bugs hindering users from participating: Failure of StackExchange to recognize when Area51 & SE accounts have the same email address – TLDR: it refreshes the reputation of new users after some time (for me roughly one day)
    – zuim
    Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 10:40

3 Answers 3

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The reason why this requirement exists is so that at least a sizable proportion of the early site contributors have experience in the Stack Exchange model, not just in the topic.

Having at least some of the contributors be experienced in the Stack Exchange model is so that they can help uphold the core Q&A values of Stack Exchange: if all of the early contributors to the site don't have experience with the SE Q&A model, there's a good chance it'll simply end up becoming like a traditional discussion forum and thus not have the advantages that a Stack Exchange site has. (And thus, shut down.)

Thus, I don't think that having a large amount of supporters who are relatively (if not completely) new to Stack Exchange offset the requirement of users who have experience would likely fly with the team, since it fails to accomplish the intended purpose of the goal.

If you're looking for another way to increase the number of such committers with experience, see if you can get some of the people who have already committed to the proposal to go earn 200 reputation on another site in the network. Provided their accounts are properly associated (there have been some bugs reported with that lately), their commitment will automatically, retroactively be counted as one of the required 100 "experienced" committers. (Plus they'll get a 100 reputation head-start once the site enters beta, enabling them quick access to many of the moderation privileges; that's another incentive.)

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Unfortunately, Mr. Cartaino was let go earlier this week, along with another CM. It seems some downsizing has occured.

This is going to make this even more difficult if we have to work around the stated requirements.

My best advice would be to reach out to the 3d printing community, as it has the most crossover with us, and ask that prominent members of their Stack Exchange site come and commit.

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    Oh, that's not good... Do you have a source for this?
    – ifconfig
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 21:37
  • It's all over the meta SE. There's like 50 thank you robert posts
    – Stephen Rossi
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 21:43
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    Yea, I see now... MSE link: Thank you, Robert Cartaino
    – ifconfig
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 21:53
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    Afaik after Robert was fired there are no moderators left on Area 51. Whether this heralds the eventual closure of this site is pure speculation, but it certainly does not bode well for its future :(
    – AEhere supports Monica
    Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 9:57
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    @AEheresupportsMonica Robert was the one keeping Area 51 running but that doesn't mean Area 51 is left in the wild, the other mods can moderate this too.
    – CaldeiraG
    Commented Jan 20, 2020 at 11:52
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    This answer doesn't really answer the question. The answer from @damryfbfnetsi should be the one that gets upvoted.
    – Nam San
    Commented Jan 26, 2020 at 13:21
  • @NamSan the only ones who can effectively give an answer to the question is actually SE staff. Sure the other answer directly answers the question but isn't very relevant until SE gives the verdict.
    – CaldeiraG
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 15:11
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    @CaldeiraG your assertion in my mind incorrect. If you someone already knows the site policy then stating it in an answer is unlikely to be any less valid than if a SE staff had said it. Given dannyfbfnetsi has been a member of meta stack exchange for over 6 years and has over 39k reputation, I’m quite confident that his answer will be close to the truth.
    – Nam San
    Commented Jan 27, 2020 at 23:01
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Just now I took the time to look through every beta site listed here: https://area51.stackexchange.com/

Interestingly, almost every single proposal made it to the beta phase with just over 200 committers....... until recently. Recent proposals have had a very hard time getting approved for beta:

eosio got 543 committers before it was approved for beta.
stellar got 879 committers before it was approved for beta.
iota got 699 committers before it was approved for beta.

Before iota, I didn't find a single proposal that required even half as many committers! They pretty much all got approved with just over 200 committers.

The requirements to get approved for beta have become extremely, extremely hard, and the experienced user base (those with 200+ points on a site) are becoming more and more reluctant to "commit" to proposals.

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  • Early proposals drew their support from existing SE network users, so they had no trouble meeting the "100 users with 200 reputation" requirement -- the hard part was usually hitting the "commitment score" requirement. Starting about three years ago, successful proposals started being those that drew on outside sources of support, making the hundred-established-user criteria the bottleneck. The requirements haven't changed in the past seven years -- what's changed is the userbase.
    – Mark
    Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 2:08
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    @Mark: The requirement changed so that you have to finish commitment stage and definition stage in 4 months each. Now way more proposals fail because this is almost unrealistic to meet (I looked at proposals throughout the history and very many of the successful proposals took at least a year to get through at least one of these two stages). Perhaps 200+ users have felt a loss of inclination to commit to proposals now that so few of them actually end up anywhere relevant. But I agree that the userbase has changed in that 200+ users are much less often committing to new proposals.
    – Nike Dattani
    Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 4:18

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