When will temporary moderators be selected for new SE sites in beta?

Question

We are about 13 days into our beta, and I'm wondering how moderators will be selected ? We've posted the moderator selection question and have votes for various individuals (disclaimer: I'm one of the candidates).

The reason I'm asking is because we're getting into situations where we are powerless to do anything without moderator power - a specific problem we're having is with one particular user asking a whole bunch of ill-thought out, unmotivated and unclear questions, and those of us with sufficient rep have been reduced to interrogating the user in comments and trying to ascertain the true intent of the posts, subsequently editing the posts. There's a fair amount of consensus on meta that something needs to be done, but since none of us have 2000+ rep, we can't do anything.

In this nascent stage of the beta, it's important to address problems quickly and clearly to set the tone for the community, and not let a few users take over the front page of the site, but we need help doing this.

Answer 1

I typically start looking for provisional moderators starting at between 14 and 16 days into the beta (if there isn't a lot of involvement in Meta, this process takes longer). Once I narrow it down, I start contacting the candidates. Between the email exchanges, setting up the access, talking about issues of moderation, and hooking them up as moderators, it takes a few days to get everything going before I post the announcement.

So, your site should have moderators appointed this coming week.

Answer 2

I think generally Robert has been handling the betas in order as they get to the 3 week mark (2 weeks public). The most recent five had their moderators announced:

• TeX - at 21 days (11 days ago)
• Ubuntu - at 22 days (8 days ago)
• Money - at 21 days (2 days ago)
• English - None yet (they're on day 22 of the beta); Robert asked them two days ago to start discussing it and said he would pick "in the next few days"
• UI - at 16 days (2 days ago)

The next one on the list is Unix, which is currently at 17 days, but we haven't been having any problems that require mods yet _{(looks around in alarm as thunder suddenly booms)}, so he might be willing to jump out of order and do CompSci next, although 11 days is pretty early.

The whole SO team are mods on every beta from the start; have you tried getting them involved? They're spread pretty thin, but they should be able to deal with whatever problems your beta has until you get elected moderators up and running