we have a problem: we can't find enough folks willing to moderate this site.
That's... Kind of a bad sign.
Background
Every site needs people to handle moderation duties. While most of this can be done by folks using the site, there are a few tasks that require special privileges:
Even with active community self-regulation, moderators occasionally need to intervene. Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.
Initially, we (employees of Stack Exchange) act as moderators on a site. But a few weeks after a site enters public beta, we'll start looking for folks who would make good moderators and contacting them to see if they're willing to be Moderators Pro Tempore until the site has grown enough to allow for elections.
Sometimes, this happens quickly - the first few people we email respond and we're done. Sometimes, it takes a bit longer. But at this point, we're over two months and only have one volunteer (moderator teams are normally at least three people strong).
We kinda need mods here. At least a couple. If we can't get that, it's, well... Kind of a bad sign.
If you're interested and qualified, volunteer here: Who should our beta moderators be?
