A day in the life of a moderator

[knut.s.grimsrud@xxxx]

There's been a lot of focus on the list lately on the performance of 
the moderating team, so as an experiment I thought I would keep track 
of my moderating activities today to give everyone a feel of a 
typical day and what is involved in moderating the list. The 
following is a recap of my efforts today -- since this message is 
somewhat off topic, please send responses or followups directly to 
the moderating team at "moderator(at)dmcnews.com"

I processed 42 messages today. I approved 25 and rejected 17 (this is 
a slightly better approval rate than I typically experience which is 
closer to 50/50, but the traffic has been focused well in the last 
couple days).

Of the 25 messages approved, two involved my sending e-mail exchanges 
with the authors prior to processing the messages. The other 23 were 
processed normally.

Of the 17 messages rejected, 4 were rejected without any comment and 
the other 13 were rejected with a message explaining the situation to 
the corresponding authors. In response I received e-mail from several 
folks which were generally constructive, but I also received a couple 
messages accusing me of impropriety. I followed up with several of 
the messages.

I'm not particularly fast at moderating and it takes me an average of 
about 60 seconds to process a message that requires no additional 
comment (i.e. outright accept or outright reject), and it takes me a 
little more than twice that long to process messages requiring 
additional handling such as sending notices to the authors explaining 
the conditions under which their post was dropped. Additional 
folloups that usually stem from this probably averages another minute 
or two. At 60 seconds per simple message and 3 minutes per message 
needing special handling, the total processing time works out to 
about 72 minutes (not including the overhead of logging in via my 
phone line and getting my act together). I logged on and processed 
messages about a half dozen times today starting with the first thing 
in the morning while having my breakfast coffee.

You might wonder why I spend such energy on behalf of the list. I 
like to think that providing someone else with some assistance is 
reward in itself. I also occasionally get a message from someone who 
has found the list to be a valuable resource and such moments are 
also very rewarding. But the bottom line is that I enjoy the DeLorean 
marque and the DMC enthusiast community, and I find it satisfying to 
think that I may in some way be contributing positively to the 
owners and enthusiasts out there that have likewise helped me.

I'm off duty the rest of this week as I've worked out a split 
schedule with Dave due to both of us having schedule conflicts over 
the next few days (another aspect of moderating includes overall 
coordination to ensure that someone is always at the helm) -- I'll be 
back next week.

Knut (moderator for the first couple days this week)