api.meta.stackoverflow.com has state:normal - is this correct

Question

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?

Answer 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.