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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

I get the analogy, but it's a bit confusing since there sort of is a Stack Overflow for US immigration:

http://expatriates.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/usa+im...

This seems more like a knowledge base for US Immigration (particular since it doesn't look like you can post your own questions).

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There's also http://travel.stackexchange.com/ for visiting the USA.

StackExchange is the reddit of Q and A. You can find just about anything, and even start a new one if you find it's missing. The important part is answer percentages, quality of answers and the behaviour of people. StackExchange websites generally excel at that.

Stack Exchange has had over 100,000+ communities started in some form, but there are only 162 that made it and still exist, so while it's true they're very good at doing Q&A for some topics, they've failed at the majority of them.

Where did you get the 100,000+ number from? I don't think there were more than a few dozen sites that were created in the Stack Exchange Area 51 process that were closed down. If you count Stack Exchange 1.0 sites when they licensed the software to other communities, there are probably a few hundred more. But I don't see how you could arrive at 100,000.

Proposal IDs started at 1 and if you sort the list by "most recent" and look at the ID, it's over 100k:

https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/106513/parliament...

The ID you're looking at isn't just for proposals, it's used for every post on the A51 site. So this number doesn't mean there were 100,000 proposals.

And most proposals are seriously terrible and never attract more than a handful of users. Even the real number of proposals on A51 wouldn't mean all that much.

Example URL:

https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/106513/parliament...

What other IDs/posts besides proposals are under "area51.stackexchange.com/proposals"?

Try this link instead:

https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/106514

If you change the proposal # to 106514, it instead redirects to your link with 106514 as the question instead:

https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/106513/parliament...

So that ID is used for both proposals and questions within area51.

You're right, for example ID 7 is a question, linked to proposal ID 4 - and you can't even iterate over the IDs to get a count, since it appears they delete the questions with the proposals, but list the deleted URL as a proposal.

Example of a deleted URL:

https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/3

You can search for "closed:1" in the search box and that apparently lists all the closed proposals. That search returns 59 proposals that were suggested then closed.

However there seems to be two types of "Closed". I'd also search for just "closed" and in the results there are proposals with a grey box and the word "Closed" which aren't in the "closed:1" results. There's eleven of those. So over time it appears there's been 70 or so proposals suggested that never made it to beta launch.

There may be more that age, eventually fall off the front end and are "deleted" and possibly not visible to low rep users, much in the same way the rest of the sites work, i.e. you need at least 10k to be able to see deleted posts [0]. I've only got 1350 rep in Area51 so there may be very old deleted proposals I can't see.

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools

10k is the rep SO requires to access mid tool, the rep required per SE varies based on the reps of the users with the most reps; SO has the highest rep users of all the SE sites. For example, 2k is the rep require on this SE:

https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com//help/privileges/modera...

Area51 doesn't appear to allow users to access the mod tools; might be wrong, but the URL pattern to view the rep required to access. If tools works on most SE sites, but it doesn't work on Area51.

> rep required per SE varies

I'd totally forgotten about that.

> Area51 doesn't appear to allow users to access the mod tools

From what I've read in meta.SE and discussion.area51, the current running codebase is kind of a fork of the original SO code (call it v1) so is quite old and isn't getting features backported to it (such as the mod tools):

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263486/remove-gravat...

There's this Q&A on meta.SE from 2015 about the future of Area51:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/263494/whats-going-o...

I haven't been able to find any recent mentions of what the future holds for Area51. I guess a follow up question to "What's going on with Area 51" might now hurt and could elicit new information.

Agree, it's a fork, and was never merged back with the main branch as it was updated.

Area 52 has been on hold for years: http://discuss.area51.stackexchange.com/questions/5089/next-...

Robert knows Area 51 isn't working, but given there's no other way to launch an SE users use it and SE as a result doesn't replace it because they're not interested in the long tail of active Q&A communities; last I checked, it takes them months, if not years to move a site from beta to live even after the community mets SE's requirements.

Basically, SE changed their past policies to avoid building Area 52 and SE has no idea what a working Area 52 would be.

If you want an SE, you've got to understand how Area 51 works, get all of your ducks in a row, then roll through it and the beta; otherwise your just asking for problems and leaving it up to SE to help, which is problematic.

To me, the more interesting question would be what are the numbers since launch for Area 51's launch funnel; that is from submitting a proposal, de-duplicating it, (etc), site leaves beta.

If you're interested in this, post a question on Meta Stack Exchange; I can pull numbers if you have a concrete idea of you want data for.

Thanks for the offer Shog, stopped using SE/A51 years ago and as is, already have a pretty strong opinion of A51.

My suggestion/request would be to just have SE post a request request for proposal to replace A51 on the main SE blog, since SE has had years to do so, has not, and positive the community would find a better solution.

There's a longer answer here than I have time to compose, but the summary is simply that we long ago abandoned the idea that A Big Rewrite was a good idea. Instead, we've been making numerous small tweaks to how Area51 operates, adjusting based on outcome, for roughly the past 4 years.

As such, the core philosophy (and bulk of the code) behind it is still more or less the same, but how proposals actually behave has changed dramatically.

We've also made significant changes to the lifecycle of sites after they're created, which you can find discussed on Meta Stack Exchange:

- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/260754/feedback-req...

- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/283663/its-been-a-ye...

Yes, aware of the changes, though to me, A51 is flawed from onboarding proposals to launching a final site.

All and all, this was one of many reasons I left, the largest being that communities in my opinion should be based around tags, not verticals; tags are in fact in my opinion how SO is run.

Again, thanks, and good luck!

> they've failed at the majority of them.

That's not SE's failure. SE has a fairly rigorous filtering process for judging whether a Q&A community is likely to survive.

Filtering out hundreds, if not thousands, of community ideas that will never get off the ground isn't failure on their part, it's the failure of these communities to reach a critical mass to be successful.

Once a Q&A idea makes it past "Area51"[0] and enters beta, which is still no guarantee of graduating to a fully launched and themed site, the SE team do actively nurture these communities to try and make them successful.

[0]: http://area51.stackexchange.com/

there was a short amount of time where anyone could create their own Stack Exchange site, but they ended up cancelling that scheme and carefully selected ones to be created now via Area51

https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/04/changes-to-stack-exchange...

So users can submit questions that our team researches and adds to the knowledge bank. In addition, we have writers that contribute content to the newsfeed based on common questions we receive. So consider it an case-by-case, moderated Stack Overflow. Given the privacy considerations, we wanted to keep any questions anonymous.

> our team researches

Are good immigration lawyers doing the research? Do you want to handing out information? If your information turns out to be wrong, the consequences could be very serious.

> So users can submit...

OT, but I'm wondering why the choice to start this sentence with "So", particularly when it wasn't a "why" question?

It's a Stack Exchange site; Stack Overflow was the first Stack Exchange site. Here's a list of all the sites:

http://stackexchange.com/sites

Yes, I'm aware of the relationship, I just didn't think it was necessary to go into detail about it. The point is, the tag line is confusing since there is something else it could be referring to.

I was misled too; though that would be "The StackExchange for US immigration"

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