Hello everyone. We hope you are well.
We want to update you on recent forum developments including giving you a little information about plans for expanding the mod team.
Before we get onto that though, we’d like to touch on something more important. In recent months, as SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world upending so many aspects of our lives, we have probably gotten used to hearing about “these unprecedented times”. More recent events in Minneapolis have reminded us of a different kind of virus that isn’t unprecedented because it’s been with us for a very long time.
We’re not going to write a long treatise on this because there are other people offering far more eloquent and insightful commentary than we can muster. But we just want to say that, as a community that has equality built into our very core, we stand firmly with all members of the Black community in calling for justice and equal rights. We’re proud to be part of a community where so many others think the same:
http://media.pragprog.com/newsletters/2020-06-03.html
“Our community” includes people of every racial background. By failing to tackle racism, we are failing ourselves. So please stand up and speak out. And stay safe.
Moving on to forum-related developments. I’m pleased to tell you that the forum has now been serving over a million pages per month from the beginning of the year. Some of you might remember that we served that much in our entire first year! This is a fantastic achievement and it’s thanks to the years of hard work that you have all put into the forum. You rock.
More users also means more for work our team, so it’s time to expand it to help spread the load.
If you think somebody would make a good moderator, please PM @AstonJ - if enough people nominate someone, and we agree they may be a good addition to the team, we’ll ask them whether they’re up for giving it a go.
Some of the things we look for in prospective moderators:
- Helpful and courteous
- Not disruptive, condescending or unkind in anyway
- Are active and visible - logging on/posting frequently and have been doing so for some time
A good rule of thumb is that when someone is made a moderator, others would easily be able to see why that person is moderator. Please also feel free to nominate yourself - we’ll count it towards your nominations!
In other news, we’re planning to launch the polyglot forum next week (originally announced towards the bottom of this announcement). Once it’s launched we will look at reviewing our moderation policies here - part of the reason we’ve delayed doing the review is because we feel the platforms will complement each other - some things might be better discussed here, some there, some polices more suited here, some there. We’ll get a better idea of this once we see how things develop.
That’s it for this update. Thanks again for helping making the forum what it is and please take care… and stay safe 
