Why are we still in Beta?

Question

I've read the meta discussion at What are the success criteria for an area 51 beta site, as well as the blog post When will my site graduate?

Neither of these helps me understand why Board and Card Games continues to languish in beta status. As of this writing, we've been in beta for 1157 days. That's over 3 years.

Compare us to a non-beta site like Bicycles. Consider the Area 51 statistics for Bicycles and Board and Card Games:

                              BicyclesBoard and Card Games
Questions per day4            3.8                                 
Answered              100%    98%                               
Avid users             173       449                                
Total users            1735     4852                              
Answer ratio          3.5        2.3                                 
Visits/day              843        5780                              

It's clear that we have a dedicated user base that isn't going anywhere, and we have significant site traffic, almost an order of magnitude more than Bicycles.

I understand that the Area 51 stats are just guidelines, and are not a hard and fast rule for kicking a site up out of beta. I understand that every site is different. But I think it's not unreasonable to feel frustrated that we don't seem to be progressing, or have any indication of when we might leave beta.

It feels like we're being ignored, because StackExchange can't quite decide what should be done with us.

Please: look again at our status, and respond here with

1. Some insight into why we continue to remain in beta.
2. Under what circumstances we might migrate out of beta.
3. When we might reasonably expect that to happen.

Update: So here we are, 8 months later. Any movement on this?

Answer 1

Board & Card Games is looking pretty strong. I think it will probably graduate soonish (which is a technical measurement). When the last community self-evaluation came through, the results indicated that quality is nice and high, but Q&A numbers are holding steady - not rising. That's the biggest concern. Questions are a Q&A site's life blood (unsurprisingly), so we elected to hold off on graduating the site to make sure we weren't about to witness a precipitous drop-off in the number of questions being asked. Basically, we needed to make sure the core community here wasn't going to drop off.

In all other ways, the site seems like it is ready for graduation and elections. When the next evaluation rolls around I think the team will look on it favorably (but I make no guarantees).

(Be advised, though, that the backlog of sites waiting for graduation designs is quite long, so even if we graduate the site tomorrow it will be quite some time before the community sees the results.)