Go back to your constiuencies and prepare for public beta!

Question

(Apparently, the question I'm asking appears subjective and is likely to be closed!)

Just a heads-up on the fact that, according to our page on Area51, this site will go into Public Beta in 6 hours' time (at time of writing).

So ... I'm guessing we should try to promote this site in all the places we "hang out" on the internet. In addition to the usual blog posts that hopefully everyone will do (who has a blog), I suggest the following:

1. People active on SO keep an eye out for questions that would work here and politely (!) suggest that they ask them here.
2. Ditto on MO and math.SE.

It might be a good idea to spread the word around a bit in the TeX community, though we should be careful not to tread on toes there. My personal opinion is that initially, any announcement should come from people already active in those communities.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Answer 1

It's great to read that the site is public now. I've announced the launch of the new site on my TeX blog. As its news posts usually appear also on other sites I expect the information to appear also on LaTeX-Community.org News, goLaTeX.de (already there), komascript.de (visible if logged in) and some feed aggregators like on texample.net.

Answer 2

When I proposed the site at Area51, I made an announcement at comp.text.tex (appart from my Twitter and Facebook accounts, but that's another story). For someone like me, who doesn't participate in that list, the announcement got a pretty good number of answers. Some people appreciated the idea and started to follow the proposal.

Later, when the commitment phase began, I made a second announcement. An interesting debate began among some members of the mailing list, and a few more users committed to the site, which made me quite happy :)

And now, here we are, only 5 hours to go! My idea was to promote the site again at the comp.text.tex newsgroup, but if someone more active and famous than me in that list wants to take my job of promoter, I'll very much appreciate.

I will also announce the open beta using my Twitter and Facebook, and even my blog (although my audience is very very small). Hey! I was thinking of sending a mail to my coworkers. If anyone wants to join the fun and promote this site using any media at his disposal (mailing lists, websites, podcasts, you name it) that would be great! :)

Answer 3

I'm going to mention this in my blog (texdev.net), which seems to get at least some readers interested in things. I've been holding off unit the beta becomes public, as I think it might be frustrating for other people otherwise.

Answer 4

Go back to your constituencies...: you mean we have to wait another thirty years to get into a coalition with someone?! There's a cheerful thought.

What does this mean for things like the site's domain name, and design, and FAQ, and so on? Does it mean that the site will definitely come out of beta and become a first-class Stackexchange site?

Answer 5

The beta begins at 0:00 UTC, August 9, 2010, which is in half an hour. The SE day begins at 0:00 UTC. For me (Eastern US time zone), this is at 8:00PM. Click the envelope left of your name in the top bar, and look for the text,

all times are in UTC; the current time is 2010-08-02 23:27:48Z to see what time it is.

This is also when the reputation cap resets, if you're affected by that.