Post-12.04 release recovery and moving forward, winter is coming

Question

Whew!

Despite the tremendous amount of work we put into being prepared for 12.04 we still got wailed on in Answer Rate. While sitting pretty on almost 85% Answer Rate the release really hammered us. Despite our best efforts, we're now close to 80%. I've been waiting for a lull so we can catch up, but the site isn't spiking and dropping like it used to, we're spiking in growth and NOT dropping; which is great for growth, not so great for catching up.

In the old days we spiked, then took the next few months to shape the content on the site for the next release. But like all short summers, the time of being small and comfortable are over. The amount of new users and incoming questions aren't going down, so I think we'll have to learn to adjust.

Unlinke last time this time we've had a bunch of new people step up to the plate and contribute. Look at the top users the past month. That's a bunch of new blood rocking it. I don't have science to back me up, but I feel like the incoming edit queue is overflowing way more than it used to.

So, we have a bunch of new heroes, a bunch of work to do, how do we move on to shaping the ship up?

Answer 1

Some ideas from me:

• There's a new data dump: http://www.clearbits.net/torrents/2017-apr-2012 We should run queries on it for questions since release to find the dupes, etc.
• Do a better job on making canonical questions awesome, like Johan's thread.
• A 12.04 specific clean up day? Talk to Oli and see if we can adapt the system to go post-12.04 so we can target that?
• Do a normal clean up day?
• Review of common duplicates. I know for example there's a bunch of "I can't login." questions with 12.04. Those are probably either the same bug or something, we should investigate.