Moderation; Needing to Strike a Balance

I admit, I was the first person on line complaining about slow moderation.   It annoyed so much to write an item, post it and then wait.  And Wait. AND WAIT.

It wasn’t as if I posted at 4:34 and the item didn’t appear until 5:56.   No.  It was that I posted on Friday and my item didn’t show up until Monday.

I wasn’t the only one marching around with a placard.   Others felt as I did, because it stifles creativity.  Many of us get ‘on a roll’ and we’ve just come in from “out there”  with six or seven ideas, and we want to write, but after the first, when it doesn’t appear, we’ll hope over to another site.

This is not good for the Slow Site.   It loses a lot of the freshest items, and becomes sort of the ‘last resort’.   For one thing about moderation; it must be ‘rapid’.

The longest pause between post and publish should be no more than 4 hours; and in some cases, less.

The Best choice, in my opinion, is to have different levels of writers.

The Newbies who are carefully moderated, for they are the most likely to use poor English (or another language) post low quality items, (or plagiarised  ones) and need to be ‘managed’.   They would be moderated until they gained a certain level and moved to the next level.

The next level would be Writers, those who need a glance of a mod to insure their English is good, their items are useful.

The top level would be Senior Writers, persons who have proven their grasp of language, their ability to produce quality.

The Senior Writers would not be moderated; read maybe for interest, but their items would be posted immediately.

The problem with no moderation, as my friend Cely indicated (on more than one occasion) are items Not written in English, plagiarised items, and poorly written/low quality items.

Nothing hurts a site more than poorly written/low quality items.

When a viewer pops on to a site and glances at what is there to read and sees …  well…  stuff … they don’t read anything.

When there are first quality items on the Front Page, the reader is inspired but never as much as the writer who has a standard to achieve.

Yes, I know I complained about Slow moderation; but I didn’t complain about moderation.  And there is a difference.