At long last, the site will launch! All our hard work here is finally paying off. This is quite exciting. But please be aware that this is not without cost. As painful as it may be initially, users may lose some privileges for a little while.
On beta sites, some privileges require less rep than they do on graduated sites. So, for instance, where you can now create a new tag with 150 rep, you'll need 300 after we graduate. What rep is required to do what can be found on our FAQ and on the list of privileges, but as a help it's posted below.
Don't be surprised by this, and be aware that we local moderators can't do anything about it. The only way to restore lost privileges is to keep asking great questions and writing great answers (and voting. Always vote. You have 30 votes a day. Use them, please).
How do we get people here to have higher reputation scores? Keep voting up those good questions and answers, that's how. Edit questions and answers into shape when they need it, so that others will vote them up. And please, don't forget to vote on questions.
(PS: you get up to an extra ten question votes per day if you vote on enough questions too)
Where we're gonna be
Where we are now ↴ ↓
Action Private ß Public ß Launched SO
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Ask and answer questions 1 1 1 1
Ask and answer questions on meta 5 5 5 N/A
Skip lecture on how to ask N/A N/A N/A 10
Add images, 2+ link, answer protected questions 1 10 10 10
Create community wiki answers 10 10 10 10
Vote up 1 15 15 15
Flag posts 15 15 15 15
Talk in chat 20 20 20 20
Comment everywhere 1 50 50 50
Set bounties 75 75 75 75
Create chat rooms 100 100 100 100
Edit community wiki w/o approval 1 100 100 100
Vote down (-1 rep on answers) 1 125 125 125
Vote in moderator elections N/A N/A 150 150
One time +100 rep to all linked accounts 200 200 200 200
Reduced advertisements 200 200 200 200
View close votes 1 250 250 250
Vote to close, reopen, or migrate own questions 1 250 250 250
Nominate for moderator N/A N/A 300 300
Create new tags 1 150 300 1500
Retag questions 1 200 500 500
Show total up and down vote counts 100 750 1000 1000
Create a gallery chat room 1000 1000 1000 1000
Edit other's posts w/o approval 500 1000 2000 2000
Approve or reject other's edits 500 1000 2000 2000
Suggest tag synonyms 1250 1250 2500 2500
Vote to close, reopen, or migrate questions 1 500 3000 3000
Approve tag wiki edits 750 1500 5000 5000
Access moderation tools 1000 2000 10K 10K
Reduce captchas 1000 2000 10K 10K
Review chat flags 10K 10K 10K 10K
Protect questions 1750 3500 15K 15K
Trusted user 2000 4000 20K 20K
Painting of unicorns, signed by Jeff and Joel 200K 200K
For the folks that don't understand why this is so important:
As sites are launched (private beta) they need a period to get a lot of content in a few days to help everybody figure out the intent of the site. That's when we added all sorts of questions, including those on NoSQL and relational databases. There were questions about cloud databases and the like.
Then we hit public beta, where we demonstrated that people would actually visit a site like this for more day-to-day usage. Then it was important to give people the ability to moderate the site on their own and build their rep on the site.
Now we've proven that this site is a resource that people are gonna want to use regularly, we need to transition to a more mature scale of how the abilities are regulated. And that's what this transition point is about.
Should we get to a few hundred thousand users we'll scale up again to the "SO" scale. We have plenty of time to worry about that, tho ;)
If you have more questions, post them below and I'll answer them in turn.
