Final Update: Now that we've launched, I wanted to update this post with our final numbers:
Many thanks to everyone who helped make the site a success!
Update 4: We just crossed over 15 questions per day and are now up to 4 "excellents":
Also of note is the significant increase in our visits/day from 2,474 to 3,648.
Update 3: We're back to 3 "excellents" as Studer is now the 5th user to pass 3k rep:
Also, there was some confusion in the last update about the "questions per day" metric that has since been resolved - it's not over the entire beta of the site but of the previous two week period. This will make it easier to improve - we only need ~35 more questions per week to be over the 15 q/d mark.
Finally, the answer ratio has seen a slight increase. My best guess is that the migration of this 97-answer question from Super User is what caused it.
Update 2: The "questions" metric has been changed to "questions per day". As such, we've now dropped from 3 "excellents" back down to 2:
We are only 1 3k+ rep user away from an "excellent" users rating, so hopefully if we keep voting we'll claw back to 3 "excellents".
Turning back to the questions per day, the number actually seems flat out wrong. According to Area 51, we've been in beta for 129 days, which would mean that we have ~1303 questions. However, the "Site Stats" box on our site indicates that we have 1648 questions. Either there's a bug, or there has been a change in what questions contribute towards that figure.
Assuming there's a bug, though, we still only have 12.8 questions per day, so we still need to get that ramped up - we're about 300 questions short right now.
Update: We've passed 1500 questions and are now at 3 "excellents":
Also of note, we've crossed over 2k visits/day and we have 38 more users with 200+ rep and 2 more users with 2k+ rep. We still need:
- 5 more users with 200+ rep
- 3 more with 2k+ rep
- 4 more with 3k+ rep
as well as increasing our answer ratio to 2.5 answers per question.
As many of you probably know, Area 51 has a set of metrics it uses to evaluate the progress of the sites in public beta:
We've always had an "excellent" percent answered, and as you can see we've recently crossed the 1500 visits/day "excellent" threshold as well. Now I'd like to see what we can do to address the rest of the metrics to bring them up to "excellent":
Number of questions should be pretty easy - at the current rate, we should hit 1500 questions in a little over a week.
Number of "avid users" is going to be harder. In order to get "excellent" in this category, we need to have 42 additional users with 200+ rep, 5 additional with 2,000+ rep, and 4 more with 5,000+ rep. To hit these targets, we'll need to
Actively recruit more users to the site. Suggestions about how to do this are welcome.
Questions, and especially answers, need to get more votes to increase the rep of the poster. We need to actively promote upvoting good questions and answers.
Answer ratio could also be tricky. In order to bring our existing question base up to a ratio of 2.5 answers per question we'd have to add over 420 answers (give or take, the ratio isn't precise). Of course, getting some answers to the 6% "unanswered" questions should be the top priority, but we should try to encourage users to add alternative solutions to "answered" questions as well.
Thoughts?
