In a chatroom, someone mentioned having trouble with an aged away spam flag on Ask Patents (the spam is still there as of the posting of this question, weeks after it was posted), and another user responded that the spam flag probably aged away because Ask Patents doesn't have any diamond ♦ moderators.
How can a community without diamond ♦ moderators start the process of getting moderators, either elected or appointed ones? Is there a specific process that the community can follow either to trigger an election or formally ask the company for Pro Tempore Moderator appointments, or must the community wait to see if the company cares enough about the site to start the process?
If there is no process, could we please have one?
This question is not about moderator reinstatement, for which a formal process already exists. I'm asking about situations in which any former moderators are either unwilling to go through the process, uninterested in returning to moderation, or were refused reinstatement, leaving the site without any moderators.
I know that there has been discussion in the past (e.g. here) about sites that are felt to not have enough moderators, but this is different - a site with zero moderators in which spam is staying up for weeks as users futilely flag it only for their flags to age away because there is literally no one on the other end.
I recognize that I could have asked this on Ask Patents Meta, but there are two major reasons not to:
- I am asking about the general case of what happens to a site without moderators, with the Ask Patents example as an example of how the issue is more than theoretical at this point. Once that process is clarified, we could get the Ask Patents community to rally around it and get it started for that site.
- Ask Patents literally has no moderators, so it seems unlikely it would get an adequate response there.