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I think as a community, we're in a bit of a tight spot with regard to Stack Exchange. If we don't redirect users to this site from the existing support forums, we'll never meet the daily site visit requirements to exit beta. However, there's still a possibility that we make this the primary support form and we'll still be shut down. If that also meant the data on this site would be lost, that would be a huge blow.

So what happens to the data if we're shut down? I know it's liberally licensed - is there a way to migrate it to SE clone software? What about valuable metadata, like user reputations, tags, etc.?

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Barring any radical downturn in interest from this community, I don't see this site shutting down in Private Beta (the evaluation is not actually complete, but my that is the recommendation I submitted). If the site were to shut down, we would be able to provide a data dump of the actual "contents" to use however you please. But that would not include all the meta data like the user accounts, voting history, and stuff like that, so it is not likely you could just plug this into a clone and continue. Usually when a site fails to leave private beta, it was because there wasn't enough interest in content to rescue. That doesn't seem to be the case here, which is why I believe this issue is largely moot.

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  • Thank you Robert! Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the process between public beta and graduation - I was under the impression a site could not graduate and would be shut down at that point. I'll try to do some reading and educate myself further.
    – Jon G - Megaphone Tech
    Apr 1, 2015 at 16:48
  • @JonG I can understand your confusion. The concept of a site going from "beta" to "graduation" is largely an unfortunate misnomer. There is a large middle class of sites that may never <quote, unquote> "graduate" simply because they may never become huge sites. But that's okay; sites in "beta" can be doing great and they will continue on that way essentially forever. I recently suggested that we stop keeping this eternal-beta label on perfectly good sites to help clear up some of the confusion. It's a bit more involved than that, but we'll see how it goes.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Apr 1, 2015 at 16:58
  • thanks @RobertCartaino - that confused me too :) I think the term implies we may not graduate as JonG points out.
    – Sonicthoughts
    Aug 5, 2015 at 23:50

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