An odd request: can we have another week in private beta?

Question

If the Community Managers team (henceforth CM) so decides, we're scheduled to start public beta in two days (Tuesday). I'm not sure we're ready.

On most new beta sites, announcements from the CM team that the site will stay in private beta for another week are met with disappointment. I'd like to stipulate that we really want and need another week.

I originally brought up the idea of requesting extended private beta (henceforth EPB) in chat, and it seemed to be met with general agreement. Here is my reasoning:

• We have a great amount of activity now. We're not going to starve of new content in EPB.
• We really haven't fully hashed out the basics of our policy yet, IMO. For example, I'm still not entirely sure when to flag an answer as Very Low Quality (VLQ).
• I'm not sure we're effectively keeping up with our existing content moderation-wise. I don't have any objective evidence of this, but it's just a feeling I have.

• When public beta hits, we're going to get a huge amount of activity. It feels like the eyes of SE in general are upon us. When we open the doors, there's going to be a rush.

  Are we ready to deal with it? Do we have enough high-rep users?

  Also, I'm imagining quite a few comments around SE on many closed recommendation questions pointing people here. These people that post recommendation questions on other sites aren't very likely to read the rules here, either. Can we handle it?

It seems weird to be requesting another week in private beta, but I believe it's fully necessary for the long-term health of the site.

Please, express your opinions in votes/comments/answers below. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

This site is all but ready to move on to public beta, but we tend to agree — we're giving this site another week to shore up the core community before launch.

You have set up a strong foundation of what works on this site, but this extra week will help you put some of that dialog into action… and to let it all soak in so the core community is largely on the same page before the site goes public.

Answer 2

I agree, we need to answer some critical questions before we leave private beta. If we don't have a strong community agreement on these we will have inconsistant policy and people will get inconsistent down/close votes, and will be driven away from the site.

Important meta-questions /policies, that are still open, that need to be decided on prior to exiting private Beta:

• Are Games OK?, At the moment games seem to be allowed (thought it is close), but we are yet to try out any (noneducational) Game questions to set how it works. (actually I'm going to do that now)
• Multiple Programs in one answer? Meta, Area51

Answer 3

The main things we need to do before public beta are:

• Evaluate the quality of what we have.
  As part of this: A call to arms: review these answers!

• Determine our minimum quality threshold.
  How are we going to moderate answers?

• Work out quality guidelines. I think we're doing well on that front: What is required for a question to contain "enough information"? from Tim Post's question guidelines and What is required for an answer to be high quality? from my answer guidelines.

• Improve or delete everything we consider too low-quality. The private beta sets the expectations for the rest of the site's lifetime. When the site goes public, we're likely to get a lot of new users sent from other Stack Exchange sites. We need to be ready to moderate them and we need to show them how to do it right.

If we can't make sufficient progress before Tuesday evening, then we should extend the private beta by a few days.

Answer 4

I would propose that the best option although I don't know if it is (easily) possible would be a limited public beta; like open it up and allow up 200 new users to register and then close it for another week. This would have lots of benefits over both going totally public and keeping private for another week:

• Give everyone a bigger pool of users to get rep from
• Give everyone with higher rep more moderating experience
• Give everyone more examples of good and bad questions (and more examples to bring to debate for those active on meta)
• Prevent an overwhelming deluge of new users until all of the policies are solidified
• (and lots more IMO)