0

i am not sure what the origin and exact meaning of the term 'linked_meta' is, but I would guess that it is a term created for area 51 meta sites and the implied meaning is clear.

Perhaps stack meta enjoys a different life than a lowly autogenerated linked_meta site, but i would submit that stack meta should be tagged as such in the interest of consistency and to facilitate programmatic handling of the /sites response, e.g. for sorting.

otherwise, we can simply ignore the site.state field and check the endpoint for '.meta.'

Is there something I am missing?

1 Answer 1

1

StackOverflow Meta is different for the other Metas.

This is one of the reasons that meta status is indicated with state and not just the site_url.

Valid states are:

  • normal - a full member of the StackExchange network
  • open_beta - a site, open to the public, who's continued existence depends on encouraging performance during the beta period
  • closed_beta - a site which is closed to the public, only committers on its Area51 proposal have write access
  • linked_meta - a site paired with a "parent" site from which it inherits users, including reputation, and is by definition in the same operating state as its parent

meta.stackoverflow.com is a fully fledged site, with a distinct reputation system.

One other vagarity of parent->child meta sites is that a user's user_id on one will be the same on the other (though a child meta account may not exist for every user). In the near-ish future account associations will start showing up for child meta sites in /users/{id}/associated as well.

3
  • understood. can we depend on the api.xxx -> api.meta.xxx convention? Jul 25, 2010 at 6:48
  • 1
    @code poet - you can depend upon the site_url -> meta.site_url convention, so by extension yes I suppose api. -> api.meta. as well. Jul 25, 2010 at 6:51
  • 1
    thanks. i am just looking for a discriminator so as to not go boom with/if a site shows up api.foometa.stackexchange.com -> api.meta.foometa.stackexchange.com - ok, so i made foometa up, there seem to be no words on the internet that end with meta, but you know as soon as I start descriminating on simply "meta." 5 'xxxmeta' sites with go prop>commit>beta in a matter of days. Jul 25, 2010 at 7:07

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .