As many of you know, Workplace SE is pending graduation as soon as the design passes it's final QA inspection. I wanted to take a moment to outline some of the changes that will occur so you know what to expect.
New Design
The most noticeable change, when it comes to graduation, will occur when Stack Exchange replaces the 2.0 Beta theme with The Workplace SE's very own custom design.
Links from other graduated sites, and advertising
Graduated sites are typically linked from the footers of other graduated sites. Since Workplace SE is in a new Stack Exchange category called Professional, stay tuned to see how this gets addressed.
Graduated sites are also revenue generators. We'll get our own meta thread where we create our own ads.
Privileges
Privileges on Beta sites are set to a reduced threshold to help get more users involved in the daily community moderation activities. With graduation, with the site scope fully defined, these privileges reset back to their default values. Here's a brief overview of some of the changes:
Beta privileges:
150 Create tags 350 Access review queues 500 Vote to close, reopen, or migrate any questions 1000 Edit other people’s posts, vote to approve or reject suggested edits 1500 Vote to approve or reject suggested tag wiki edits 2000 Vote to delete closed questions, access to moderation tools 3500 Protect questions to prevent answers by new users 4000 Vote to delete negatively voted answers and stronger question deletion votes
Graduated site privileges:
500 Access review queues 1500 Create tags 2000 Edit other people’s posts, vote to approve or reject suggested edits 3000 Vote to close, reopen, or migrate any questions 5000 Vote to approve or reject suggested tag wiki edits 10000 Vote to delete closed questions, access to moderation tools 15000 Protect questions to prevent answers by new users 20000 Vote to delete negatively voted answers and stronger question deletion votes
To see all of the graduated site privileges ahead of time, see the Stack Overflow Help Center Privileges page.
Use graduation as an opportunity to use all your votes to vote on great content. This will help boost our collective reputation and lift others up to those higher levels. In the meantime, use your flags and comments to help deal with trouble spots. Moderators will be keeping a close eye on things to help make a smooth transition.
Moderator Elections
Speaking of moderators, while we've heard nothing official yet from the Stack Exchange community team regarding moderator elections, we do know that graduation is when communities hold their elections to select moderators. The winners of the elections replace the provisional pro temp moderators appointed during the public beta phase.
For an overview of what to expect during the elections, please see Stack Exchange Moderator Elections Begin.
Preparing for graduation by cleaning house
This is a good time to prepare for graduation by using your privileges and access to leave this site in a good position when it launches. jmac compiled a list of questions with delete votes. I'll be going through this shortly to take care of any obvious low quality material.
You can also help by editing posts to clean up spelling, grammar, or formatting issues. If a question is inappropriately tagged, use this as an opportunity to retag it. While you're at it, upvote good content and downvote the bad. As always, if you see anything that you aren't able to fix, be sure to flag it for moderator attention.
It's exciting to see this site graduate, and I'm looking forward to seeing Workplace SE with it's new theme. The hard work that this community put into defining the scope of this site has paid off! Nice work!
