I'm curious about the requirements for *.answers moderators. How much
time does it take (minimum) per week?
(Note that I'm no longer an active moderator, but I don't think any of
what I'm going to say here has changed (yet), although I'm sure one of
the other moderators will correct me if I'm wrong.)
There isn't really any minimum (or maximum!) time spent by the
moderators per week.
Unfortunately, because the machine that most of the moderation work
takes place on is so hosed, processing a single submission in the
queue can take fifteen minutes, even if the actual processing is
simple, because of the overhead. Because of that, the moderators tend
to try to do chunks of the queue, rather than single messages, when
they do anything, so that the overhead time is drowned out compared to
the productive work time.
The overhead time will be reduced when the machine's hardware is
upgraded and when the long-anticipated rewrite of the *.answers
database code happens. Those are supposed to happen "soon," but there
are no guarantees.
If a moderator is busy, he might not spend any time on *.answers stuff
in a particular week. If he's got some free time, he might do twenty
hours of *.answers work. Anything in between that will help to some
extent.
Do you have to be physicall *at*
MIT, or can you do it from anywhere?
From anywhere.
It seems to me that if the answers
to these two questions are "five-ten hours/week" and "no", then the
current collection of FAQ maintainers might make a good pool of potential
*.answers moderators and one might consider providing us with more details
about the job.
We have, in the past, sent our "This is what it means to be a
moderator" article to the faq-maintainers list, and we've gotten a
small number of bites from it, but not a lot of them. Perhaps one of
the other moderators will send it out again.
Please keep in mind that, as elitest as it may sound, we don't let
everyone who wants to be a moderator. When I was the only one making
the decisions about who could be a moderator and who couldn't, some of
the factors I used were: experience with the Usenet; experience with
UNIX and Perl (because the moderation software is UNIX/Perl-based);
general competence; ability to get along with the other moderators;
ability to handle conflicts with submitters tactfully and
successfully; anality (because little mistakes make a difference in
*.answers work; existing reputation on the net; general attitude; and
the amount of time available for *.answers work. I suspect that the
current active moderators are using many of the same criteria to
select new moderators.
Obviously, many of these criteria are subjective, and there is some
potential for us to make a mistake and turn away someone who would
have made a good moderator (or accept someone who turns out to make a
bad moderator!). However, even if the system isn't perfect, it's the
best we can come up with. The overhead of bringing a new moderator
on-board is significant, and getting rid of someone once they're a
moderator is much more difficult than not making him/her one at all,
so using a "trial period" to test new moderators seems to be a bad
idea in this case.
I personally would be willing to spend five-ten hours/week learning how
to moderate and then doing it, provided I could try implementing the
system I've suggested. There may be others here who would also be
interested.
Speaking for myself, if not for the other moderators, I must say that
I find your attitude arrogant. "I'll help you, but only if I can step
right in and change how you do things, because I think it's wrong."
You'd have a much better chance of being accepted as a new moderator,
and even of gaining a new understanding of why the moderators do
things as they do, if you asked to become a moderator and work within
the current system for a while before preaching about changes to be
made. To be blunt, you have very little idea what it's like until
you've been part of it from the inside.
Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@cam.ov.com
(creator and moderator emeritus of *.answers :-)
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