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Comments don’t get reviewed for four-five days straight which sorts of makes the entire thread lose momentum. Do you need more hands on deck?
Dear Kian (or whoever it is who is currently calling the shots at LI nowadays),
I have been observing some highly erratic behaviour on the part of the moderator(s) here. I am not talking about the standard of moderation or bias, which can and has been debated ad nauseam in other threads. I am merely talking about the practice of moderation itself.
First of all, it is clear that there is no guarantee now that a comment once posted would at all be published regardless of how clean it is. Please do not contest that point, because I myself have posted numerous helping comments across multiple threads without saying anything bad or nasty, and about 60% of those have been published. The rest remain unmoderated for 3-4 days, after which they become indistinguishable from comments that have been deemed unpublishable because of content, and eventually, they drop off the picture altogether.

2. Secondly, I understand that the lack of staff and dedicated moderators is the primary reason behind this, given the new IT Rules. However, that does not excuse the highly erratic behaviour of whoever is currently moderating. Let me explain what I'm trying to convey here.
Let us assume that the moderator can spare 30 minutes a day for moderation. Logically, they should use this time by going to the earliest unmoderated comment and work their way through. If that means that new threads and newer comments would have to wait for some time to be published, then that would at least become predictable. If someone has some urgent thread, then that can be marked suitably during posting and it can be prioritised accordingly. Instead, what is now happening is even comments to threads requesting urgent advice (quite likely during the CLAT phase) are staying unmoderated and unpublished for days, and instead new threads are cropping up.

The other part of the story is that surely those 30 minutes can also be more or less structured? For example, if you clearly mention in a pinned post that the moderator would be unfavorable unavailable during the weekend, then people won't waste their time posting something on Friday night or Saturday morning, because by the time moderation happens next on Monday, these comments would mostly disappear in the subsequent crowd and never get published. Again, this is something I'm saying from personal experience.

These are just some genuine concerns and suggestions that I have raised and made here. I fully understand that we cannot demand prompt and effective response and moderation on this forum currently because of existing constraints. However, even if someone is volunteering to moderate unpaid, and can only spare a little time, adopting some of the practices that I mentioned might streamline the process and render it more consistent, which will benefit the users, especially those who still use this forum to seek genuine help and advice. I happen to believe that despite the recent increase in trolling and political and religious mud-slinging here, coupled with the usual juvenile law school rivalry, the number of help seekers and those who are willing to provide useful advice is not very insignificant either.

Sincerely,
A veteran LI reader.
I agree fully with your comment. The moderation standards are hopelessly bad, to say the least. What is happening here is not only a terrible delay in publishing the comments but also a sheer incompetence of the moderator(s). I've noticed many comments are marked as "unpublished due to moderation" and are then published days later after the entire discussion has lost relevance. Either the moderator here is completely unqualified to moderate and cannot understand English (or Hinglish) very well or the moderator herself/himself has some agenda in publishing the comments extremely late.

I don't think the volume of comments or their content is so much or so complex that it ought to take anything more than 20-odd minutes every 6-12 hours or so to publish most of them. Instead, it takes days, even during a crucial period like the CLAT time where there is actually some use for this website.

I personally think it would be better if the site just shut down for good rather than running this facade of a discussion under some horribly under-skilled and uninterested moderators. Now, I'll go out on a limb and bet this comment of mine is either left unpublished for days or is flagged and not published at all. What a joke.
I agree, everything is moderated to the extent that even clean comments don't get published.
Yes, indeed we do, thank you for asking and apologies. However, we don't have the tech infrastructure at the moment to expand moderation majorly so we are working on that at the moment.
I get that you combine threads, but do both the heading still remain visible on the main page? And what the OP suggested, can you do something on those lines? That doesn't require more people or tech changes immediately, just a more structured and consistent practices. You can come up with your own rules, just make them into a sticky thread at the beginning so that other users can understand those and post accordingly.
True, I've noticed the same. Not expecting them to do anything about it, either: at best you'll get three lines of an appypolylogy vaguely talking about how they're trying their best and they have the prerogative.
I mean- why do you keep bumping posts that have jussst been posted? It’s annoying. I think this thing has run it’s course tbh- good run, but now I’m coming on here more out of habit than for anything semi- real/ interesting. Y’all wanna think about just shutting it down and starting a new thing?
Dear LI Gods, you just marked my comment as 'featured'. Make me a mod now.
As an option, LI may explore the possibility of allowing users to post a comment instantly (without moderation) by solely using 100 - 500 already moderated words.
That sounds like a fascinating idea, if only as a social / language experiment how creative people would get... Also, are you inspired by Dark Souls by any chance? :)
Hope you guys do give it a try. Might be fun to think inside the box.
Also, no.