Why should site proposals require groups?

Moderation isn't the only issue, although that's one aspect of it. We don't want to set out to create ghost towns.

The point of making sure that there are people who are interested in a proposal before turning it into a full-fledged community is to ensure that there are people who contribute to it, and avoid a ghost town of an empty site.

While there are cases on our network where this hasn't worked out as well as we would've hoped, we still want to at least minimize the chances of us creating a community that nobody is going to use. It's bad for SEO, it's poor UX if someone comes knocking and looking for help, and it can be frustrating for the one or two people who were involved that nobody else seems to want to join them.

As for pulling in mods from other communities - Codidact staff, at least members of the Community team, have mod abilities everywhere. We can handle simple flags. The problem is that on communities such as Mathematics... I don't understand what goes on there, so I can't handle those flags. My understanding of the subject matter isn't good enough to effectively handle flags - that's what community moderators are necessary for. So pulling in other mods or depending on staff isn't a great option, because we won't necessarily be able to handle it the same way.

To sum up, we require a certain core group of people to exist before spinning up new communities, because we don't want to create more ghost towns.

posted over 3 years ago

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Mithical‭ staff

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