h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"We have Moderators working through the queue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they aim to have read every single piece of new content within an hour of it being posted."

OK - this is a fine concept, and you do allude to the fact that the Moderators will become more adept and self-reliant over time, but once the site is opened to the world, then surely it will test this enigmatic group to breaking point?

I write in total ignorance of precisely how many Moderators there are, what sort of hours they work and so forth. However, given that you state that your aim is not only to have *every* new piece of content vetted, but to go through the not inconsiderable amount of backlog as well (24/7 too!), I can only assume that there is quite a substantial pool of said Moderators, operating on staggered hours.

Not to be snide or condemnatory in any way, but it seems to me to be a potentially incredibly labour-intensive task, and one of whose effectiveness I am yet to be convinced. Is there any chance you could shed any more light on how this group is made up or will operate?

You're spot on, Nexus. But as they say round these parts, leave that to us: it's our challenge, not yours.

But to fill you in, it's a variable resource, that we can increase as traffic increases. FYI, the current moderation team can easily cope with the daily influx of new content that we were seeing before the site took a breather, and we are confident that they will continue to make inroads into the legacy content while coping with new material.

The biggest challenge is the 'spike' of reactivation when we re-open, but that's a one off. We'll be fine - honest!

One supposes that not long after relaunch promotion of h2g2 will resume? If so, they're also going to have to deal with the Tomorrow's World effect poor people. Still, I suppose that's mostly site traffic and forum posts rather than masses of new Entries.

My best wishes to the Moderators and good luck to them! They'll certainly get to read some interesting stuff...

So I can rest easy without getting mental images of a poor little Bob Cratchit-type figure sitting at his terminal at 4am with a Sisyphean workload building up before him? Oooh - there's another scary mental image - a kind of 'moderation hydra'; for every thread that's passed, another two spring up in its place!

I've been talking to them, and apparently they're finding the Guide and the conversations very interesting reading. I mean you lot stay up all night and read it for nothing...

That's true. Glad they're not finding it boring!

It's probably a bit like a job I used to do, only a lot more interesting - I had to go dig around sites for a company who provide the secure payment services for e-commerce, to make sure the sites weren't breaking the company's terms and conditions for providing the payment services. Some of those sites were very interesting indeed... the number of ways they came up with to break the T&Cs was quite phenomenal. Of course, that was a very different kind of moderation to what's being done here, and no doubt a great deal more boring.

I was just about to say the same thing, Nex! But I suppose if no-one breaks the 'House Rules', the moderators won't have such a hard time, EXCEPT:

if h2g2 is promoted by the BBC regularly, we can expect THOUSANDS - at least - of people on here, not just the hundreds (and usually tens) of simultaneous users h2g2 is used to.

Anyway, as you said Mark, that's for you to worry about!

Sure is.

Wibble, wibble...

* worries *