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I've noticed a sudden increment in the close vote queue (minimum 10 per day, upto 15 or so) for the past few days. Maybe people (except a few) haven't noticed that mods are having a vacation. I can feel their absence in the active page. They haven't informed anything about this to the community...

Manish told me and Chris that they're off to see if the community is interested in reviewing close votes. As far as I've seen, only a few users are interested in reviewing close votes and even less members in reviewing reopen votes (as it requires somewhat deeper look into the post). They are right about the evaluation of community. As it looks like a good decision, I honor it. But, for how long?

What are they doing now? (Actually, where are they? :D) Is this some kind of secret spying?

And, a humble message to my fellow users...

C'mon guys, Please spend a few minutes reviewing...

We don't just ask & answer. We can help it grow ;-)

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    $\begingroup$ If the mods are on holiday, we can sneak in some spoof questions - "Path Integral Treatment of Hogwarts Invisibility Cloaks", "Incoroporation of Spoon Bending Interaction term in SM Lagrangian"..... $\endgroup$
    – twistor59
    Jun 11, 2013 at 16:55
  • $\begingroup$ @twistor59: Always interested in Sci-Fi... That's why I don't like TP people :P $\endgroup$
    – Waffle's Crazy Peanut
    Jun 11, 2013 at 17:13
  • $\begingroup$ @twistor (a) There is no spoon (b) LOL. I actually asked a question (On April Fools Day 2012) about a renormalizable theory that explains why socks go missing. Got some great answers, too. I'll get you a screenshot once I'm on desktop again. $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Jun 11, 2013 at 17:51
  • $\begingroup$ @Manishearth: Gotcha (You've already showed me that "Fools Day" poster)... Misusing the mod power for personal advertisement. Someone notice me - Kill this Mod-Bot ;-) $\endgroup$
    – Waffle's Crazy Peanut
    Jun 11, 2013 at 17:54
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    $\begingroup$ I would help if i had more rep, but i don't $\endgroup$
    – Prathyush
    Jun 11, 2013 at 21:30
  • $\begingroup$ @Prathyush: Don't worry... You'll get it soon. Where are we gonna go..? ;-) $\endgroup$
    – Waffle's Crazy Peanut
    Jun 12, 2013 at 4:46
  • $\begingroup$ @twistor59 i.stack.imgur.com/cq6f3.png $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Jun 12, 2013 at 6:02
  • $\begingroup$ @Manishearth LOL! - keep a copy of those for history's sake $\endgroup$
    – twistor59
    Jun 12, 2013 at 7:26
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    $\begingroup$ Probably worth noting that close flags are going to be skipping the moderator queue in favor of close review fairly soon... This is something the whole community should be involved in - if mods have to pick up the slack, so be it, but it affects everyone. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Jun 24, 2013 at 2:58
  • $\begingroup$ @Shog: Cool... Just as I expected (:D) But wondering whether this scheme is temporary (for community evaluation) or "forever"..? $\endgroup$
    – Waffle's Crazy Peanut
    Jun 24, 2013 at 4:02
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    $\begingroup$ Forever is a long time. But generally-speaking, the goal is to get stuff that the community can and should be handling out of the private mod queue and into somewhere more public (where mods can and should still chip in as-needed, but in public and without it being solely their responsibility). $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    Jun 24, 2013 at 4:04

2 Answers 2

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We're not on vacation (well, Qmechanic is this week, but that's unrelated). And this has actually been going on for more than a few days. It was actually a few weeks ago that I noticed, as did the other mods (I presume), that we started getting some questions closed with three, four, or five community votes. So we're backing off the closing intentionally, to push the burden of closure on to the community. (To some extent. It's a gradual process.)

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  • $\begingroup$ I know. "Vacation" was phrased intentionally so as to get some attention ;-) $\endgroup$
    – Waffle's Crazy Peanut
    Jun 11, 2013 at 19:17
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    $\begingroup$ As a point of reference we have more than 65 non-moderator users with close/reopen power at this point, which would seem to be enough to close really bad question within a few hours if people are looking at what needs closing. $\endgroup$
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Jun 13, 2013 at 17:12
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I used to be one of the more active mods in the queues. When I went on my 1.5 week vacation, my binding vote was lost and thus many posts in the CV queues stayed there.

At the same time, it seems that the others withdrew a bit more from CVing. We've always tried to "wait for a couple of CVs to trickle in"; nothing new in that.

I don't think that there was any communication on this; it was more of a coincidence. I was away for that time, and one other mod was also quite busy. That may be enough to account for the jump of the queue to 40 when I got back.

Anyway, after coming back I noticed that there had been quite a few community closes and a bunch of 4 vote qs as well. Which is quite good, I hadn't expected that. So I continued to ignore the CV queue. I would visit it now and then to take out a few questions, and I would sometimes act on some flags. But that's it.

I think the other mods looked at it in the same manner.

This wasn't really a communicated decision of the mods. If necessary, I don't have an issue with returning to the queue. I already am keeping it at a manageable level and completing 4-community-vote closes.

Since this wasn't a communicated decision, "how long" isn't really known. It would be good to see how many community closes we can get in another week, IMO. If questions are taking less than a day to get community closed, then we may not need to actively VTC at all.

Again, if the community really feels that we should just actively close everything that needs to be, I personally don't mind doing it. Just that it will be harder to scale as the site grows.

Remember, it's a mods job to handle what the community can't. On most sites, closing is not done by mods, it is instead (mostly) done by the community. If we can get there, the mod can then focus on more important things.

And yes, we're still here. Doing various things -- there are other things to deal with than closing.

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  • $\begingroup$ Just making the show public. I'm aware of every single event. Looks like some kinda "mod entanglement" ;-) $\endgroup$
    – Waffle's Crazy Peanut
    Jun 11, 2013 at 16:24
  • $\begingroup$ For that matter it was public, just buried in steaming piles of chat transcript. $\endgroup$
    – Manishearth
    Jun 11, 2013 at 16:24

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