How should sandbox retirement be handled (if at all)?

Question

In a similar vein to my previous meta post, we're going to have to deal with having the sandbox on meta. And currently, the sandbox situation is a bit... messy. Here's a simple plan (or, at least, starting point) in order to deal with the difficulty of the current way of handling this (which is basically "retire the sandbox whenever someone feels like it").

• Create a faq post for a description of the sandbox. Instead of pasting that huge boilerplate each time a new sandbox is created, simply link to this post. (A directory may also be included, which seems like a good and generally well-accepted idea.)

  • I have already posted a [faq-proposed] post, which can be found by following that link.
  • This linked post also standardizes on the title, tags, and body of sandbox posts. I will perform a mass edit if / when we agree on a standard. (This may not even be necessary if we decide not to retire sandboxes.)

• Agree on how to handle the retirement of sandboxes.

  • My own proposal can be found in the answers.

Answer 1

Proposal for the handling of retired sandboxes - Don't!

I suggest to stop retiring sandboxes and keep using a single one. Sandboxes should be sorted by activity, because even at 50 or 100 answers, they are too big to find the active ones when sorting by votes. Assuming everyone does that, we can basically forget about the additional pages, because they will be populated by either posted, deleted or abandoned proposals. If someone's proposal takes a while and floats off the front page, they can always get more attention by posting a link to it in the chat room and asking for feedback. If the challenge is good to go, they'll be told, and if not, they will probably make some edits which will also bump the question to the top.

This would be even more effective if we deleted posted challenges. I really doubt that anyone actually follows those links we leave behind or looks through revision histories to see how challenge specs evolved. That seems like a very romantic idea, but I don't think that's actually happening. Hence, posted challenges may as well be deleted since they don't really serve any purpose other than cluttering up the sandbox. Of course, deleted answers won't move to the bottom if you're sorting by activity, but if we all did that, it might even make sorting by votes feasible even if the sandbox gets older.

So:

• When you post a challenge, edit down your proposal to the title and a link to the challenge. Then delete it. (The former step is just being nice to people who can see deleted posts.)
• Get in the habit of sorting the sandbox by activity.
• Never retire the sandbox.

Let me know if I've overlooked any obvious downsides (which is likely), so I can try to address them.

Edit: Doorknob requested feedback from an SE dev whether some large number of answers on a single question will cause technical problems. The answer is that there is no limit we are likely to reach and due to pagination, load times won't be affected either.

Answer 2

Proposal for the handling of retired sandboxes

• When a sandbox reaches 100 answers or more, it should be retired.
• There will always be two featured sandboxes at a time: one retiring sandbox (the previous sandbox) and the current sandbox. When the current sandbox retires, it becomes the retiring one, and the current retiring one is "properly" retired.

• When a sandbox is retired, (retired) is appended to its title, and this text is prepended to its body:

  This sandbox is retired.

  To find the current sandbox, see the sandbox FAQ. Please post new proposals in the current sandbox, although proposals here may still be worked on until they are ready to be posted.