It's a big day. You've been cleared for graduation by the Stack Exchange Community Team! Emacs met our threshold for graduation-worthy sites and after a review, the Community Team determined that you're good to go. Reaching 'mature community' status is a big milestone, and you should be very proud.

Your site actually passed this threshold a few weeks ago, but we experienced a number of issues with the first wave of design independent graduations. We've since resolved these, so I'm happy to announce that we're ready to flip the switch for you.

What does this mean exactly? Graduation works in two phases. Starting today, you'll receive the following benefits:

You will soon have an election for community-voted moderators - there is some backlog here as the elections for some of the first-wave sites have also had to be delayed. Elections for you and the other sites in this wave will start being scheduled in December.

You will no longer see the "beta" label attached to your site's name

You will become eligible for question migration paths with the rest of the network

You will soon be able to select your own community ads. We're very close to the new year and the new ad cycle, and we have some exciting changes planned for these as well. These, too, will begin in December or early January so that you may enjoy the new changes.

The site will still receive a full design from one of our designers, which will be packaged with an increase in the amount of reputation needed to access each privilege. It's no secret that our backlog for site designs is long, so instead of making you wait to receive all the parts of graduation at once, we wanted to give you the things we could give you now. We think we've hammered out most of the bugs in the process,, but there are still likely to be some left - so if you come across anything out of place, please report it on Meta Stack Exchange using the [graduating-sites] tag.

This site has reached this point because of your generous contributions. Together, you've created a valuable resource that helps people. Congratulations on all you've accomplished.