What does the community need to do to help the moderators?

Question

We're a week(ish) into having moderators. Let's get some feedback from the trenches...

In the past week, I've noticed that our moderators have been busy (Undo, Adam, ArtOfCode) with revisions around the site. This is great and you guys are helping clean stuff up.

Since being appointed you guys have done a lot of clean up. What do we need to do to help and take some of this burden off of you?

I don't want you to be bored, but I also don't want the community to become dependent on the moderators cleaning up after us.

Answer 1

Flag Stuff

I can't stress this one enough. While the site is relatively small, we can watch over most of the content that goes on here ourselves. But, doing that is a lot of work and we do have other lives, believe it or not :) . This is what flagging was designed for. As you go around the site, if there's something that looks bad, strange, or worthy of some form of action, flag it. Our flag queue has seen 2 flags in the last 5 days (I think) - it's not like we've got masses there.

Talk to us

Come and talk to us! We've got The Rec Center, our chatroom, and we've been seeing some new faces recently - which is great! Come chat to us, just generally, or about stuff you've found on the site. Got an idea but not sure if it's worth it? Come and get some quick feedback from someone in chat. Occasionally, one or other of us drops something into chat that we're not sure about, and asks for feedback on it.

Meta is Not Murder

(reference)
The more people we have on Meta, the better (pun rhyme intended). Meta is where we live, mostly, and it's important that plenty of feedback and discussions about the site are had there. Disagree with an action we've taken? Meta. Want to see us take an action, and nothing's been done? Flag, then Meta. Want to solicit feedback on something about the site? You get the point.

Vote

And by that, I mean all types of voting. Normal up/down voting shows us what the community here think of questions, which allows us to help future posters with advice for their questions. Close voting helps us to recognise what the community wants in scope, and is also very helpful in borderline cases where a hammering isn't appropriate, but the question may need closing anyway.

Answer 2

ArtOfCode's answer has done a great job of answering the real question here, so I'm going to address something else:

I also don't want the community to become dependent on the moderators cleaning up after us.

There's some truth here - but all communities are dependent on moderators at first. We only have 4 non-moderators that can edit, and not a single one that can vote to delete questions/answers.

Even on SR, a site that's been around for > 18 months, I still don't think we've community-deleted anything. We technically can, but just barely. This site will rely on moderators to delete things for months, possibly years, to come. That's normal.

Where the problem comes, though, is if people stop flagging and moderators have to hunt out the bad content on their own. Ideally, a moderator should be able to sit in the flag queue and get notified about all the bad stuff to delete.

I'd say that the best way to help out right now is to flag stuff. It's much easier to push the big delete button when you know you have even one other person who agrees that it should be deleted.