GoKawiilI am here today to update you on the beta site and its future.
First, thank you for all of the feedback - your thoughts are appreciated and have significantly impacted the decisions that we’ve made about how we move forward.
TL;DR - We will be retiring the beta site shortly and will be removing the button to get to it and ceasing support for it.
We will not be migrating the unified posting experience to the main site. Not migrating the unified experience to the main site will obviate the need to solve the issue around the conversion of comments and answers to “replies”, because that was tied to this unified post experience.
We will be massaging the subjective/opinion based content that was submitted in the beta site to the Q&A format, but we are still figuring out exactly how this will work. We will need to do this with sensitivity to the fact that “replies” were more conversational than answers would be.
We will not be migrating most of the design elements from beta at this time: for instance, the homepage, the navigation, the left and right sidebars, and the wider layout.
The retirement of the beta site will happen in the coming weeks, and we’ll communicate more as we get closer.
I think it’s important to recognize the hard work of everyone who put their energy into the beta experience - it did exactly what a beta should do: it explored what new directions and iterations we can take on the site, even if that means eliminating ideas that don’t work. While there’s no question that there were some fumbles in the rollout, I think that ultimately we’ve learned a great deal about how to make major, substantive changes to the site in a way that respects the desires and wishes of all who built and continue to contribute to this incredibly important resource.
Note: This is not an April Fools joke.