Post History

I agree that the site proposal and validation process needs a re-do.

One of the biggest problems I see right now is that everything about a new site is limited to a single "question" in the Site Proposals category.  That makes sense in trying to keep the chatter about individual sites from drowning out the list of what sites are being proposed.  However, it greatly diminishes the usefulness of the voting mechanism we already have.

What we need is some kind of container for a set of posts about a new proposed site.  That way one post can deal with the scope, and try to nail it down by voting on competing answers.  Another could have a list of sample questions so that the community can indicate which ones are on topic by voting.  Another post would be about who is willing to participate and at what level.  There could be multiple answers for <i>expert</i>, <i>enthusiast</i>, <i>casual</i>, and <i>lurker</i>, and people upvote what they think their participation will be.

New questions can arise as additional issues come up that don't fit neatly into what was already mentioned.

The problem then is how to provide this container of posts for each proposed site.  One possibility that works within our current mechanism is to have a category for each proposal.  However, I think that would cause confusion with other categories that are not about proposals, like main Meta and Blog currently.

I think a separate Proposals site makes more sense.  Each new site being proposed would get its own category there.  To reduce clutter, the categories for sites that get launched would be deleted, or perhaps moved to a Proposal Archives site that would be read-only.