On a monthly basis each of us tends to action roughly one flag a day, but also close a question every other day and keep a general eye on the site activity. Adding an extra to the team should mean that we each don't need to do quite as much as we do currently. Every little helps. Things only tend to get busy on the days you're feeling pro-active. :)

@IñakiViggers - thanks very much for your kind words. BH is a great SE site and I've really enjoyed seeing the user base develop over the past few years. You can't please everybody - and that's not what we're here for - I suppose I just want the whole community to feel safe to be themselves and express their opinions. And so I'm hopeful for the whole community to understand and believe that we're behind them on that.

Hey I saw that candidates are lacking, and I'm thinking of standing... I haven't been active recently, however; so I'm hesitating... I have an excellent understanding of how SE works, but I'd have to tread cautiously on questions about scope at first since I'm really not extremely familiar with those meta discussions... Hence I find "close a question every other day" a trifle concerning [...]

If I were to be elected, would it be an inconvenience to the moderator team if I have to tread lightly on question closure for the first few weeks/months? Also, any other thoughts / reasons I probably shouldn't stand given my low activity?

@anonymous2 TBH, I'd be a little concerned as you haven't been active recently. I'd prefer to have someone who was more familiar with the site and could get started quickly. Especially because we asked for this election because the workload was getting quite heavy for us

But if you think you can get up to speed soon enough then by all means nominate yourself.

Yeah I follow... Maybe I'll hold off a few days and see who steps up; hopefully there are some more active users willing to invest the time. Meanwhile I'll browse around a bit and try to get a feel for how out of touch I am haha

Oh weird didn't see there was a candidate this morning when I refreshed the page

@anonymous2 - I agree that we'd all rather be much more light-handed with question closure. In the current 'moment' we've had a combination of lots of new users unfamiliar with the site scope and a lot of more experienced users who don't engage with the VTC process and so prefer to answer off-topic questions, and end up encouraging them. It's been a journey of knowing when to usher faster question closure to help the community learn, vs trying to avoid stepping in too quickly.

As part of this process we've been trying to encourage more of the community to get involved in VTC, and that's the best end goal. If our experienced community members are getting involved then we can step back a bit more.

I've seen a few cases where an off-topic question sat so long where its three or four Close votes aged away, without a single person voting to keep it open. So that's the background there.

@anonymous2 - I'd be supportive of you as an experienced Moderator and somebody to help instil more of the core SE values. The site scope has plenty of nuances and history, but we're not presently getting many candidates aware of those either, and sometimes having a cautious attitude is the best starting point. Happy to chat more about any specific questions or challenges of the site or its moderation. Maybe browsing the Closed questions could be a good start for seeing some of our challenges.

@SteveTaylor Yeah I see... have a similar issue on IoT actually; though the question & case load over there is small enough that we can keep an eye on questions that we feel should be closed but want to allow the community to have their voice; we'll frequently wait until there are at least two or three close votes before throwing on the hammer

Browsing closed questions seems like a great idea; I've been scanning meta to get a feel for site scope so far; will do that as well :D

@anonymous2 - I think it's got a special case over here because there are a number of users with favourite theological topics which they want to explore through questions, whilst the site scope is all about exegeting specific texts and avoiding that type of explicit theological focus. Sometimes it's about helping users find ways to frame their questions to explore the passage they're interested in, and removing the theological angle they'd prefer to impose on the passage.

Differentiating duplicates can be challenging too - knowing when a subtle nuance is really a different question, or whether it's been sufficiently covered by other answers.

@SteveTaylor Ah I see

@SteveTaylor In other words it's insufficient to simply read the question; you have to read the answers as well?

I can definitely see how it could be a lot more nuanced than a technical subject

@anonymous2 - Sometimes. It's a real challenge having lots of nuanced questions based on single passages or subsets or supersets of those verses. So yeah, sometimes that can really help. Not a necessity for most of our work, but the increasing number of very-similar questions which the authors maintain are distinct is one of the things I struggle with personally!

Huh yeah makes sense

@anonymous2 "you have to read the answers as well?" It's not that you have to read also the answers. What happens is that downvoters/VTCers sometimes miss the merits or subtleties of the question they think should get closed or edited out as "irrelevant". An answer might identify/highlight subtleties that to others were going unnoticed but which are relevant to the question.

@IñakiViggers Good point

@IñakiViggers I don't really agree. Questions stand or fall on their own merits. There's always something interesting in a book of the Bible, but that doesn't mean all the questions are good. Just because an answer is great doesn't mean the question shouldn't be closed.

@curiousdannii "Questions stand or fall on their own merits." Exactly, yet questions might get closed because their merits went unnoticed to enough voters. Comments explaining the reason for VTC are helpful, but a voter's/commenter's misunderstanding of the question/subtlety can (and often does) prompt others to VTC an actually meritorious post. "that doesn't mean all the questions are good." I'm with you also on that. Definitely not all questions are good.

@IñakiViggers It's not the answers' job to clarify the question. I don't think the situation you're describing, where answers illuminate the merits of their questions, happens very often. And anyway, questions are closed for being off-topic, unclear, or too broad, not for being uninteresting.

But we should be careful when closing questions to ensure we do accurately understand them. And we can help edit them to make them clearer too.

@curiousdannii "It's not the answers' job to clarify the question." And that is not what I meant. Answers are only to address the question. However, although unusual, an answer can rely or be premised on a subtlety that to others hitherto was going unnoticed. Elsewhere on SE I myself have posted answers in such scenarios. On occasions I even have had to cite from the revision history a material detail that someone else had edited out.

What has happened to me on other stacks is that the answerer sees something in a question / has a similar background to the questioner / has more caffeine in their system than I, resulting in their being able to understand a question which I was 100% certain was unanswerable. In that case, their answer can shed light on the question, and in which case the question should absolutely be edited to clarify the inquiry

While it's not entirely identical to the discussed situation, I do see some merit in reading others' interpretations of the question; it can shed light on nuances I didn't see; it can also reveal details that have been edited out / ignored as @IñakiViggers mentions

And as a sidenote looks like the election is getting a lot of late attention; 3 candidates so far :D

@IñakiViggers Yes, answers can show you that you misunderstood something about the question