It's been a few months since your previous beta progress update, so I want to check in again.
I'll start with the good news: you're continuing to do well on the primary metric for graduation, new questions per day. And you're making progress on the main issue I was concerned about in the previous update, building a corps of higher-rep users; you've gone from no 10k+ users to two, and you're right on the edge of having ten 3k+ users, too. Well done!
Unfortunately, as you might have expected from my wording, there is still bad news. A while ago, one of your mods asked me about stepping down for personal reasons. There hasn't been any visible change because I haven't been able to find a replacement for him yet. Those of you who have read about the changes to the graduation process posted last year on the network meta (maybe after reading the first beta progress update?) may remember that the second half of the post dealt with making the site closure process more systematic. From that post:
If there's enough moderation for a public beta site to consistently remain free of spam, for flags to be cleared, and for our Be Nice policy to be upheld, your site will remain open. However, if community leaders drop off, flags sit without being addressed, and we can’t find any suitable volunteers to step forward, the site gets closed.
Please do not be alarmed. This is not a "we are closing Arduino SE" announcement. We aren't at that point yet. Your mod team hasn't abandoned you, and the proverbial lawn is still getting proverbially mowed here. If anything, this site feels a bit like it's on autopilot. I don't get a sense of the community taking ownership here. Aside from the lack of people willing to be pro tems, there's little activity on meta—especially for a site this size— and still a somewhat low answer rate. This may be due to as simple a reason as diffusion of responsibility, or it could be somehow related to the topic of Arduino itself, or something else entirely; discussion is welcome.
This is an admittedly unusual situation. No community has ever simultaneously set off the questions-per-day graduation trigger and the "lack of moderation" red flag. To be honest, I never seriously considered that it might happen. I don't see any reason to deviate from the procedure in place for handling the moderation situation, though, so I am announcing an open call for new pro tem moderators. You can find out more about the job at the company blog post A Theory of Moderation and the now-somewhat-old meta post Who will be the Moderator? What attributes should they have?. If you have questions or want to volunteer, please e-mail me at pops@(stackoverflow or stackexchange, either one works).com.
Quick recap: there's (still) a lot of good here, but there are a few serious problems, too. Keep up the good work on question volume and building up the ranks of medium- and high-rep users. My immediate priority is finding new pro tem moderators. Once that situation is stable, we'll try to tackle some of the less serious issues, and re-evaluate for graduation.
