Hey everybody,
I just wanted to let you know that the mods are a bit overwhelmed by all the recent activity on the forum, and so struggling to get all comments approved as quickly as we would like. I also have work and family matters taking some of my attention. I have called on inactive mods for assistance.
One option might be to move some of the active threads here (to Side Conversations) so they do not require moderator review. I need to clear waiting comments first, then I’ll move threads.
Why not simply dispense with pre-moderation?
That is essentially what I’m doing by moving threads to Side Convo. It also moves them off the front page, so they should be moved back eventually. It’s not a long term solution.
Seconded. Not only would that ease the burden on mods, it would allow conversations to move more quickly. If some uncivil comments get left up for a few minutes ort hours before being modded, that seems a reasonable price to pay.
Part of the problem seems to be that “Conversation” (pre-moderated), as opposed to “Side Conversation” (un-pre-moderated), is the default for creating new conversations [further addendum: it appears that it isn’t so much an explicit default as the ‘first option that comes up on the list’ – which most people therefore choose]. And people mostly simply go with the default (to the extent that I have had people react with surprised pleasure when I’ve created a Side-Conversation).
I take it there’s no way to change that default?
Addendum: This would seem to indicate that it can be changed:
It would be nice if the were a trust level which could post immediately in otherwise moderated main page conversations.
Unrelated, but I just found a post which was “Automatically Deleted by Timer”. This is a housekeeping function of Discourse to prune empty topics after comments are moved/merged to another topic. Somehow this timer got set on the new topic I created from @Nesslig20’s RNA World comment.
This topic timer isn’t visible to moderators (not in our control), and it is separate from the timer that automatically closes comments. I will ask at Discourse Meta if there is some admin setting for this. In the meantime I’ll try to pay more attention to new topics created from moved comments.
I when through several years of the Deleted Topics log looking for “lost” topics, and restored one other that should not have been deleted.