Discussion: Should we advertise for people to assist us in CHQ and with the review queue?

On Wednesday a few of us discussed using SE/SO’s offer of free advertising to recruit new members with an excellent record of flagging to join CHQ and assist with the workload.

While some of the work is done automatically there is plenty of work for humans available in the form of review, currently we have more than 1600 posts awaiting review, and responding to SmokeDetector in the CHQ Chat.

The newest post on SO regarding advertising is: “Open Source Advertising — 1H 2019”. You’ll notice that SOBotics has already placed an AD request.

You can view other accepted ADs by clicking this link, and refreshing the webpage multiple times.

Once we discuss if we want to have an advertisement, we would create an AD image (300x250, max. 150 KB) and submit an answer to the above thread in the following format:

[![Tagline to show on mouseover][1]][2]   [1]: https://cdn.sstatic.net/img/ad-placeholder.png [2]: http://clickthrough-url

That procedure shows the AD to people on SO only, to everyone eligible to see ADs, and presumably not to anyone whom doesn’t see ADs. That is the simple standard procedure.

What we need is a little different.

It serves our purposes better to target high reputation users (whom may not normally see ADs) - whom have a large number of “helpful flags”, and a low number of “not helpful” flags. Additionally we would benefit by showing our AD on all sites, not simply Stack Overflow, to users whom best meet the privileges requirements.

Stack Exchange might consider our extended request since we serve all their sites with the free service of spam flagging and removal (and some NAA flagging). We would need to have the blessings of Stack Exchange and the developers to tune our AD to target a select group rather than only showing it to low reputation users on a single site. I am willing to ask a few of the CMs if they are supportive and would bring this up in the next meeting, if we are in agreement about moving forward with this.

Discussions, comments, and ideas welcome.

[ArtOfCode-]

I have wondered about whether we should use an SO community ad to get more contributors. However… I don’t think that’s the right approach. Hard though it is, what we need are people who stick around long-term and get detailed knowledge of the systems, and recruiting via a sidebar ad… ain’t going to get us those kind of people.

What Undo said yesterday in chat was certainly a good point: there are plenty of those kinds of people on the network (see: Teachers’ Lounge, Blue Room, SOCVR, SOBotics, etc). Where we fail is in making use of the available time those people have. There may well be a project or two in that, to grab unfinished tasks like those in review and give a few to each room every few hours.

Beyond that, I think the best we can do is realistically to keep awareness up - not exactly evangelize, but make sure that we’re visible and that people know what we do, as far as we can manage. That gives us the best chance of people who are interested in this kind of thing and will stick around coming along organically.

[iBug]

The first impression to me is that it’s a crazy (read: extremely innovative) idea. But with just a few more thoughts I don’t think it’s viable to do, unfortunately.

• First, so far, the privilege of giving feedbacks has always been manually granted. This is a huge barrier for people wanting to participate and I don’t think it’s a motivation enough to drive us into changing this barrier. We’re not SO who grants review privileges by your Q/A score (50 upvotes on an answer = First Posts and Late Answers access)
• Second, we’re asking people to do certain work, with what you’re proposing. The SOBotics one, IMO, is a broad invitation to contribute (in any way the contributor find convenient). Your proposal, however, is too specific to count as an “open invitation”, IMO. It may not be suitable.
• Besides, “Charcoal [intersect] SO” == spam on SO. The other participant, SOBotics, works in a variety of aspects of SO, but we only focus on spam. Given the volume of (serious) spam on SO, we probably don’t contribute as much to SO as we do to Ask Ubuntu or Super User. Given that, “the SE network”, or MSE, would be a better place if such a request (to ask others to review) really needs to be made.

With what I’ve said above, I like the innovation, but I’m inclined to deny this proposal.