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Comment by teh_klev | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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