Can we get an additional moderator for Stack Apps? [closed]

Question

Currently, Stack Apps has only one moderator, Nathan Osman. He's good when he's around, but he's sometimes gone from Stack Apps for days at a time.

For example, it's been 2 days since he last visited any SE site; and Stack Apps has off  topic, and even spam¹ questions lying about. (Plus edits and flags)

Can we get at least one more moderator? Stack Apps is low traffic (0.9 questions per day), but I figure a mod should check on it at least once a day. (And, yes, I volunteer -- or please setup elections.)

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¹ Update 1: The spam post has now been removed, probably by finally getting enough spam flags (it took about a day).

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Update 2: Dredged up today's stats for all SE sites that either had less traffic than Stack Apps or had fewer questions per day. Here they are:

Site                        Visits   Questions  Community
                            per day  per day    Moderators
==========================  =======  =========  ==========
Project Management            1600      0.8          3
Spanish Language & Usage       995      0.5          3
The Great Outdoors             882      0.6          3
LEGO® Answers                  770      0.6          3
Programming Puzzles & Code     638      0.9          3
**=> Stack Apps <=**           478      0.8     **=> 1 <=**
English Language Learners      394     12.0          3
Martial Arts                   390      0.7          3
Reverse Engineering            366      2.3          3
Robotics                       312      1.1          3
Chess                          284      1.4          3
Chinese Language & Usage       278      1.1          3
Tridion                        272      5.4          3
Libraries & Information Sc     177      0.3          3
Politics                       164      0.9          3
Russian Language & Usage       164      0.6          3
Poker                          154      0.4          3
SmugMug                        140      0.3          3
Genealogy & Family History     127      0.9          3

It seems that Stack Apps may be unique among all the sites in having only one *Community* moderator. And, since it's an established site, that's been around longer, it seems like [a bigger target for unsavory posts][7].

Answer 1

Stack Apps is unique in that it's more of a showcase for applications written around our API and a resource to find libraries to interact with it. The site sees only marginal flag activity, and the current moderator does a pretty good job of staying on top of the flags and janitorial work the site creates.

What the site does not have is a default contact in the community team, since it's rather different - there didn't seem to be a need to add one. We've assigned one, thus guaranteeing that at least one employee will be stopping by the site daily in addition to the moderator keeping an eye on it. Thus, nothing should go without being handled for too long.

As for another moderator - the site could conceivably sustain an election, but I really doubt that there would be any kind of turn out - we'd probably end up giving diamonds to the one (or two) people that bothered to nominate. If flag activity starts to warrant more help, we'll revisit it then.

Update

Because we know he'll do an excellent job, and because he seems to want it, we're appointing Tim Stone as a moderator on Stack Apps to add his skills and some redundancy to the team. Tim will be receiving his diamond shortly and going forth into Stack Apps moderation awesomeness.

Answer 2

First off, I'd like to just clarify exactly what happened: I had an extremely busy week at work. Now normally this doesn't affect my ability to moderate since I am still around during the evening. However, everything just piled up to create the perfect storm and the only time I was able to much of anything was Tuesday evening (I closed a couple of posts).

As Tim has already stated, the site receives a relatively low number of flags - enough that one person could easily deal with them. Also, the vast majority of off-topic questions on the site are from users who are confused by the name of the website (Stack Apps). Dealing with these questions is easy enough, but I wouldn't be opposed to a name change if it were determined that this would result in much fewer off-topic questions.

If it is decided that another moderator is needed, I would certainly welcome him / her and their assistance - but I really don't see a huge need for that at this point.

Perhaps a better option would be to lower the rep. requirement for closing questions. As has also been mentioned, there are a pitiful number of users with >3k rep. It would be great if more users were able to vote for closing questions. As of today, changing the requirement to 1k rep. would result in 49 additional users being able to vote to close questions.

As always, please continue to flag as usual and I will continue to process flags as best as I can.