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Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

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

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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!

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