58

Update

The Staging Ground Beta is now live. Thanks to everyone who volunteered to help review. We are no longer accepting reviewers at this time. If you don't have access to the Staging Ground and you can see it, please let us know.

The request

We will soon open up the Staging Ground, our new asking environment for first-time askers, in a closed beta test. We need volunteers to review questions and give us feedback on the reviewer experience. The test will run from December 8th, 2022 until around December 22nd, 2022. We will accept around 50 volunteers for this closed beta test.

What you need to know:

  • Volunteer reviewers will join a private Stack Overflow for Teams instance to provide feedback about their experience as a reviewer.
  • Questions that go through the Staging Ground will be real questions from real first-time askers on the site. There will be a cap enforced on the number of new questions that are waiting for feedback (which will initially be a pretty small number).
  • New askers will be randomly chosen, based on the cap room in the Staging Ground. There will be no way for new askers to opt-out.
  • This is a limited beta to test the Staging Ground; we are specifically looking for feedback on how it works and feels to reviewers.
  • Only volunteer reviewers, randomly sampled authors, and Stack Overflow moderators will have access to the Staging Ground during the beta period.

How do I know if I am qualified to participate?

You are qualified to participate if you meet the following:

  • You have access to review queues (reputation is over 500 and you are not currently suspended from the review queues).
  • You are ready to provide feedback to us using the private Stack Overflow for Teams instance to which you will be invited (and an invitation can be sent to the email address saved with your user profile).
  • Priority will be given to users who have review queues experience, especially in the First posts or First questions queues.
  • You are available to provide feedback on the Staging Ground experience from December 8th, 2022 to December 22nd, 2022, and can commit to spending at least two hours during this time period testing the functionality and giving us feedback.
  • You agree not to share content from the Staging Ground or screenshots publicly before it is released on a wider basis.

How do I volunteer?

For those who would like to volunteer, please join this chat room and ping Yaakov to volunteer to participate in the beta test. The Staging Ground team will consider anyone who expresses interest and meets the requirements above.

You will know that you have been accepted when you get a link inviting you to the private Stack Overflow team for Staging Ground Testing, and will be considered as having agreed (on an honor basis) to the terms defined above when you join this team.

What is in it for me?

All reviewers who participate will have special early access to the Staging Ground. In addition, reviewers participating in the staging ground pre-launch will be rewarded with special silver badges (to be awarded after the testing phase of the Staging Ground has been completed).

What comes after this beta test?

Following the beta test, we will analyze the feedback and usage of the Staging Ground, along with some planned new features, before making a go/no-go decision for broader deployment. We do not have a final date yet for the public test release, but we are targeting sometime in February 2023 as our goal.

Have any unanswered questions? Let us know!

8
  • 9
    Hmm, I would have liked to participate in this, however, I openly admit I don't do reviews. Instead, as I'm very active in the tags I am a (self-proclaimed) SME I tend to see all the "first questions" in the content I view on the questions page; would it still be worth asking to participate or would I be immediately discounted?
    – Thom A
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 15:39
  • 11
    @Larnu you won't be immediately discounted/disqualified
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 16:10
  • 3
    I assume not being willing to join an so team would be a disqualifier?
    – Kevin B
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 16:13
  • 5
    @KevinB if you wont join an SO team, then that would disqualify you from this early-access beta test. That is going to be the avenue of giving feedback. If that is the case, you'll just have to wait to see it like everyone else.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 21:03
  • 4
    Nice Initiative but I'm "afraid" it will be a bit "useless" and very frustrating for the (Beta) Reviewers if you don't finish the "Staging Ground Workflow: Canned Comments" Project first, by publishing a List of which (validated) 'Canned Comments' will be available and how that Functionality will work.. But the @OP from that Thread hardly followed up (only 1 little Comment in the whole Thread), other Staff posted in it but "they are not the CM". I reported for example some "stupid" Typo about some missing "s", ... that 6 weeks later still has not been corrected...
    – chivracq
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 6:23
  • 9
    @chivracq we have an updated list of the canned comments, with many changes based on feedback to the post. Sorry, haven't gotten around to updating on that post yet, will do so very soon.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 29, 2022 at 7:44
  • 1
    Can I review only questions for the tags that I am following?
    – Bergi
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 1:36
  • 5
    @Bergi there will be filters for tags you are watching and for tags in which you have badges.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Dec 2, 2022 at 9:51

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
16

During the beta, about how many questions will go through the Staging Ground?

It is being asked that all of us combined put in 100 hours, so that would be a lot of questions.

6
  • 13
    A priority for the beta is to not let in too many questions, as we dont want to have a bad user experience for the beta askers (who do not have an opt-out), so we will have a code-enforced ceiling of # of questions that can be in the SG that are waiting for a response. We will start pretty low with this, and will see how fast reviewers get through them. If we have a good response from reviewers, we will raise the ceiling as-needed.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 21:38
  • 8
    But it is hard to give an exact number. If we get 50 reviewers, and all of them put in a full 2 hours, and each review takes 1 minute on average (and we assume half the time is spent on reviews and half on giving feedback), so that would end up being 60 x 50 = 3000 reviews. So that is a general order of magnitude. But the exact number - we'll only know after the fact.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 21:40
  • 8
    But important to note: the ask is for 2 hours - including time spent giving feedback and figuring things out.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 21:40
  • 7
    Also, there will be some questions that don't get reviewed, and will auto-graduate to the site after 36 hours (I think that will be our starting number for that), which will take up room in the ceiling during that time, and will add to the total number of questions that go through the SG during beta testing.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 21:44
  • 1
    @YaakovEllis So the review queue will have a cap like some other review queues, and while the cap is full (at least during the beta test) new askers will essentially circumvent the staging ground workflow?
    – TylerH
    Commented Dec 5, 2022 at 14:32
  • 2
    @TylerH yes. Though the cap will be defined by the number of posts in SG that are waiting reviewer feedback. Questions that have received reviewer feedback and are awaiting Authors to respond/update again will not count against the cap. The idea is to always have a relatively small number of posts waiting for reviewers, but not too many. We'll play around with it during the test if we need to.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Dec 5, 2022 at 14:39
15

When will we know if we got accepted or declined?

It is said that the beta starts the 8th, but not when we find out we got accepted or declined or when the emails are sent out for the team (if you got accepted).

1
  • 14
    We have to finalize a few things with the SO Team for the beta, which should hopefully be ready in a couple of days. At that point we will start sending out invites to join there. If you get an email to join the team, you are in. I will post updates in the chat and on this post as well.
    – Yaakov Ellis
    Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 21:28

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .