The new Sitecore Stack Exchange site is now open to the public. Congratulations, and welcome to your new site!
Original Post:
We recently announced closing this private beta due to an apparent lack of demand for the site — but in fairness to this community, there seems to be some extenuating circumstances regarding the timeline for this launch, and some lack of clarity about what a private beta entails.
We decided to extend the private beta another two weeks to verify if the renewed energy and flurry of activity is sustainable.
That puts us into a bit of uncharted territory. Stack Exchange has never been about quantity over quality, but when you're put on the spot to "ask more questions", that often prompts a few users to conspicuously load the front page with whatever they can ask. So before a few users go on a question-asking spree, please read
Your new site — asking the first questions
I want to assure you that we are not looking for {x} questions to "pass" this site. While we love enthusiastic users, we are generally looking for a pattern of broad participation — this is important — so rather than a few users asking dozens of questions, what we are generally looking for is a broad buy-in from an enthusiastic community who will help curate this content.
The hallmark of a healthy Stack Exchange site is a strong ethos of continually vetting and improving these posts long after they are written. That means fostering a broad sense of participation and ownership so folks will not only post answers, but help improve what has already been posted. That means more views and judicious voting on the relative merits of what you see to help assure the best answers rise to the top. You can only do that with more users. A sense of broad community vetting is a big part of this site.
So forget the stats in Area 51; don't obsess over your question count on the front page — the question count is only a means to an end… and that end is building a collaborative resource for sharing knowledge. Your main task now is to help assure we have enough broad activity behind this site assure it stays interesting… so folks will keeping coming back long after this site goes public.
Good luck!
