Rushed proposals and Community Moderation

Question

According to this question the advancement from definition to commitment is completely automated. That is of course a very reasonable thing to do for proposals that reach the commitment stage in the usual time spans—which I figure is at least two weeks, most of the time months.

Today, however, iota progressed to Commitment within two days. That is a very double-edged sword. It deprived the usual Area 51 community of the ability to moderate the questions by close votes. While I can't seem to find the site listing all the followers (if that exists) the right-hand stream of last followers contains barely SE users at all. Just a handful, including myself, have any reputation on other sites.

Only yesterday when still in Definition I issued a bunch of close votes on questions that seem to be a very bad fit for a Q&A site on the network. There are also some duplicates in there. For good reasons example questions are locked in Commitment. Thus, no other experienced SE users can even voice their opinion on the quality of those questions—after all, I might be completely wrong on some or even all questions with my opinion.

The problem however is that with this proposal being rushed through definition within two days the whole concept of community moderation on those example questions seems to have been circumvented.

While a minimum age or a minimum number of SE experienced followers would help, I'm not sure that's a good way to go. Now however, we have just the barrier of SE users (and Robert and CMs of course) before the proposal reaches beta ready.

In my opinion such proposals would benefit a lot from a bit more community input—and also the silent review of visitors who don't cast close votes. After all SE is community moderated.

From my personal point of view there's now a proposal in an immutable state of an interesting topic that has a bunch of very troubled questions. Which looks not really commit-worthy now.

Answer 1

I agree this is a major problem when it happens — but it does have a solution pending, sort of.

I've designed a "circuit breaker" which addresses this exact issue; unfortunately, I don't think it will get implemented for quite some time (at least months, but probably closer to next year if ever).

In the interest of transparency — I've currently halted feature designs for Area 51. The bulk of the dev team(s) have switched over to the Talent product for the foreseeable future, so it's not yet clear when/how resources are going to switch back to Q&A development. We had already planned for a month-long delay with the hire of a new Q&A project manager, but my last round of Area 51 improvements dates back to February 2017 and it's still "pending estimation". The circuit breaker design isn't even part of that release, so with the backlog of Community Team feature-requests piling up, I see no relief coming soon. so…

How does a "circuit breaker" work?

Currently when a proposal nears the end of Definition (typically ~10 questions remaining), it undergoes a Community Team evaluation before it passes into Commitment. During that process, if the proposed community isn't vetting their own content, I can (and do) close any closely related questions as a duplicate (among other sanity checks).

But if a proposal races through Definition, by time I receive the "time to evaluate" notification, it's already too late.

A "circuit breaker" will add a temporary soft stop to a proposal that passes from Definition into Commitment without going through the Final Evaluation process first. With a typical proposal, I would have already completed the Final Evaluation before it reached that point, so most people wouldn't even know the circuit breaker existed. But for that rare situation when a proposal is pushed through with little Community Team or Area 51 scrutiny/vetting, this will slow things down just long enough to take a closer look at the proposal before storming forward.