Changes to Freelancing moderator team, and scheduling a moderator election

Question

You may have noticed that some moderators on your site have lost their moderator access today. On July 8th, 2024, we released a new version of the moderator agreement. Moderators network-wide had 30 days to sign the new agreement. Of the 600 moderators network-wide, around 44 did not sign the new revision of the moderator agreement by the deadline. As a result, those 44 moderators’ diamonds were removed today.

While we are generally satisfied with this outcome, unfortunately some sites lost more moderators than others. On Freelancing, there is only one moderator remaining as of today.

We are currently in the process of scheduling new elections where needed, and we will prioritize sites like Freelancing that have been harder hit by this change. Until a new election concludes, Community Managers (Stack Exchange employees) will be checking on Freelancing occasionally to assist with moderation. However, please be aware that it may take a bit longer than normal for flags to be handled.

We would encourage you to begin discussing and organizing your community for an election, and we’ll be around to schedule one soon.

In the meantime, we strongly encourage curators to use site curation tools to the best of your ability (up/down voting, closing, editing, flagging, and reviewing), in order to provide a good experience for users of Freelancing in the interim. If you see anything that needs immediate staff attention, please feel free to contact us.

Answer 1

Ouch... We're back to square 1 here, aren't we?

This is a shame. I thought, after the 2021 election, this site would be in good hands. I noticed that Magus was no longer a moderator not long after that election, but despite that I felt like morsor (and Canadian Luke, of course) was handling things fairly well. To see morsor gone now... That sucks.

If you're reading this and you have over 300 reputation, please consider nominating in the election that's forthcoming. The workload to moderate a site like Freelancing is quite light. You'll likely be asked, rarely, to handle things with your new tools that other users can't. These actions are very unlikely to consume more than a few minutes of your time each day, but they are important to curating a healthy site.

Freelancing has a repository of Q&A content that I feel is worth keeping around. If things return to where they were in 2021, it's likely that Stack Exchange will reconsider keeping Freelancing open as a site. Site closure is not something I'm ever really comfortable with, but the alternative is an unmoderated site where users can come and post whatever they want without anyone to deal with unwanted content.

I am not as interested in Freelancing.SE as I was back in late 2022. I come here infrequently, see that not much has changed, and navigate away. Given that lack of passion, I'm not very interested in becoming a moderator here at this time, because I feel that the job I would do would be subpar. If you have any more passion for the role than me, and feel like you can take a stab at keeping the lights on, please step forward during election season.