Holy mother of activity Batman. I can't believe I read the whole thing...

@jmac Jmac! :D

@Shog9 I think you got it wrong, Workplace community (and Programmers for that matter) is not trying to limit participation. In that sense, we're essentially the same as SO, and opposite to how you describe CS. It's not about participation, but only about wrong way how SE team advertises site questions. Amount of answers is good heuristics to detect potentially interesting questions at early stage, but when there's sufficient voting evidence, it's time to drop it...

...Mistake to do so is the root cause of why things break. Hotness score continues encouraging more answers when there's no need for that and answers pile on, further pumping the score and encouraging even more answers. That's what turns normal process of accommodating new users into destructive lemming rides. It's not that prominent at SO only because of "penalty" (what a word!) that saves it from getting too much exposure in the list and because it has much more moderating powers...

At smaller sites, there's nothing like that and so they suffer most

> "What moderation (closing, editing, deleting, commenting, tagging, flagging, etc.) would you like to see the community be more active in, and how will you encourage that?"

my biggest WTF at nomination page: no @enderland in there

@gnat someone said something similar about yourself too ;)

Hope no-one minds but I will be trying to keep on-top of the stars here, the room has a fairly good purpose and it'd be really beneficial to have relevant things starred (rather than the usual 'star the fun stuff!' of the generic chat rooms :P)

@RhysW good, I was going to do that yesterday but am not room owner here..

I liked that :p

see watercooler :)

@gnat thats a fair point then i guess!

Is jmort not going to run?

@Seth that's the main intrigue now, after enderland has de-nominated. Everyone around fears that he won't

oh

Getting very irritated by the lack of @enderland on the nominations page

@gnat think of it as more of a handicap - 17 out of the top 100 would be SO right now without it. Nothing special about most of those questions - just an incredibly large pool to draw from.

@Shog9 hopefully you're able to get over yourself ;)

hasn't happened yet

@Shog9 hmmm. going to be rough then - I do not plan on running

bummer

There's several quite compelling reasons, too, I'm not just being finicky

@enderland too much good sense, eh? I hate it when folks have that.

@Shog9 if you're curious I've no problems letting you know exactly what the reasons are, but probably won't do it in here :P

@enderland You know I'm just giving you crap - your reasons are your own and can stay that way if you prefer.

plus we have great candidates now and even if no others nominate themselves Workplace is going to be in great shape

strictly-speaking, if no one else nominates the election is called off

in that it's not an election and they are auto enrolled?

Not much point in running a 3-position election with only 3 candidates - the outcome is pretty much a given

Might as well just ask for volunteers

Isn't asking to self-nominate the same thing?

It's just that if more people volunteer than spots available, that the community gets to choose

@CMW pretty much, but with enough candidates you can at least pick the best of the lot (per your own personal criteria)

Without that, it's like those stupid local elections where half the positions have only one candidate on the ballot

@Shog9 write-ins FTW!

@enderland that's essentially how the first few elections on SO worked - anyone could nominate anyone.

I liked it a lot better philosophically, but... We ended up with a lot of folks who weren't all that interested

@Shog9 such as might be the case, me, should that be allowed here? ;)

It's easy to see why. I could easily see some combination of top users here winning this election without particularly wanting to, just on name recognition

and then what? You have moderators who aren't moderating, and a bunch of users who need help and don't have it.

Folks like to complain about the moderators, but you do kinda need someone to be the scapegoat. Otherwise, folks would have to blame themselves for the sorry state of things, and that ain't gonna happen.

The real reason is Enderland knows how much of a PITA I am to the mods and wants no part of it :)

@Chad that's probably at least 50% of the reason

The other 50% being he knows how much of a PITA he is to the mods and doesn't want to miss out on that

@Shog9 My only real complaint is that we don't have enough of them... sadly the number is not going to change. Would love to be able to keep our current ones and just add a few to augment them

@Chad if we managed to end up with a big pile of nominees, we could always call up a few runners-up to meet demand afterwards. But otherwise, cranking up that number of positions is just wishful thinking.

And we always run the first election as a replacement for the pro tems, because that's the deal when you accept the appointment.

All 3 of them have helped guide this site to this point and all 3 of them deserve the credit for that. I hate to lose them and their experience.

@Shog9 not really, I'm not going to run for an election if I'm one of 3 mods on this site - I'd be MUCH more likely to run if it was, say, one of six

I can't commit to being 1/3 of the official moderation, but, if there is actual depth to the team the committment is less

@Chad realistically, any or all of them are likely shoe-ins if they wanted to run

@Shog9 I disagree

unless there is a way to show "what activity have all mods do" in a way to convince me otherwise, at least

@enderland can't quite parse that

as best I can tell, the moderation workload for the past 6 months has not been even close to 33-33-33

from my perspective, closer to 80-15-5

It never is

that's one of the lessons we learned from the first review system

if you encourage/enable cherry-picking, most folks will just cherry-pick

Nothing wrong with that, except it does tend to leave a big pile of tedious stuff for the handful of folks willing to just slog through it

I dont know if its really cherry picking, so much as one of them was willing to go above and beyond and do it visibly to the other 2 have always been a lets be the silent hand only stepping in where we absolutely have to

like I said: slog through it

I have no Idea about their actual numbers but I know when I went looking I see that they are all 3 doing their parts

night guys

'nite

@enderland FWIW, that's why I dislike large mod teams: tends to be a lot of dead wood.

Not always, but...

This site really should not be a huge amount of work for 3 people

Looking at changes that'll reduce it considerably

the main issue is "how to moderate low quality but not spammy" stuff - NAA? VLQ? downvote/delete vote? etc

this is not a problem SO faces

^^^ "should not be a huge amount of work for 3 people" yeah sure.

@enderland not really. I mean, that matters, but it's... borderline bikeshed. The real problem is identifying low quality

@gnat That just tells me that TWP needs a handicap

with 100+ sites, none of them should have more than a handful in the list at once

@Shog9 if you think so, consider posting an answer in the question that raises concern about this

your comment hanging in there makes one think that you don't care:

@gnat meh. There are a few feature-requests for this floating around already. Either someone will come up with a clever way to calculate these handicaps on the fly from historical data, or we'll just hack in another magic number somewhere.

all right. Meanwhile, let there be 3 mods to handle these lemming rides

A magic number that the mods can influence would be great

Remember, if we get it right, you won't be able to tell.

@gnat the goal is always to have at least 3 mods. A site with less than 3 mods is in serious trouble.

so mods can decide to go more for growth from the network or sustain current levels by toning down the hot list influence

@CMW no, it'd be terrible. That's like a recipe for "oversteering" - jack the number up to get visitors when things are quiet, then crank it down when you get overwhelmed, then crank it back up when you're languishing again... There's too much lag and... pure randomness... involved to be useful.

That's why I'd prefer a system to just generate handicaps based on a site's past tendency to produce "hot" questions.

@gnat yeah, I have no idea what you're saying there.

But hey, feel free to step up - kinda pointless talking about 4 mods when there are only 3 willing candidates.

:shrug:

What's up with non of the pro-tempore mods nominating themselves? I'm not that familiar with the workplace's community, but it seems odd.

no problem

@gnat Nothing magical about moderators. No matter how you slice it, either you get 4 effective people who were already being effective and now have bigger tools but no longer count as "a normal user"... Or you get someone who has no idea what to do with the tools and is mostly just filling a seat.

Out of the top 10 flaggers on TWP, three are already running, two have explicitly stated they won't run and one was previous a moderator here.

So...

@Shog9 "magic" happens when moderator gets loaded by flags queue. At Tavern, you once demoed me some of the crap one has to waste time on dealing in it instead of finding and flagging really troublesome stuff

I prefer low active flaggers to run for mods. Additional bonus is guys like that would more likely to make unbiased arbiters between posters and flaggers (I've seen it work that way at Programmers and I like it)

@gnat none of those currently

the problem is people with few flags will be bad flag handlers (generally).

jumps in.

@gnat maybe. But then, that's why I've been working to push some of the tedious crap out of the mod queue: going to all the effort to identify and elect someone really great just so you can stick them with mindless work isn't all that great.

Also worth noting that what seems like a huge burden on a young site becomes less of one as moderators gain experience.

@Shog9 Programmers is a mature site but per my observations handling hot questions there remains rather heavy burden for moderators (even though they are exposed less than Workplace)

> Given that hot questions may pop up and require moderation any time 24x7, what would be your take on arranging a "line of duty" with other moderators to ensure minimal danger to the site?

Need a picture of a red phone in there

"It's 3AM..."

@gnat What mods do: Programmers vs. The Workplace

Back later.

@enderland if I may make a suggestion, since both nominations and the primaries are non-binding (you can drop out before the primaries finish), it may not hurt to nominate yourself and see what the community says about it. Depending on your situation, another week may change how you're feeling, and it would be a shame to see you not there if you were able to participate.