*deep breath*
It's been 136 days, or about 4 and a half months, since this thread was opened, with 849 new approvals in that time.
That's six approvals a day. Across 5 staff. Because you aren't the only staff member, chrono. Even if you alternate weeks so you only do approvals every other week (thereby taking into account that sometimes the mods/admins will be busy-lets say 2 staff a week are available to look at approvals, a laughably low number), that's your 20 approvals/week right there, which should frankly take about 5 minutes. Every other week. With only 2 staff. Of the *five.*
If all five spend 5 minutes a week- which I frankly hope they certainly can- that's 100 approvals, right there. Out of the ~40 that come in that week. For effectively five minutes a week. In 5 months the queue is gone- basically half the time it took to make the queue, while staying on top of the new stuff.
Spend a whopping *ten* minutes? Two months. The staff make a concerted, hour-long effort to clean it out? The queue is empty. Right then and there.
And most of them are likely spam, easily identified by the username or email- a quick 'that may be legit' or 'that's an instant no,' because most people, frankly, don't have emails like
jsdf9yhisefh9sfd7j@mohtivin.com or something.
Because these are the accounts that's already triggered the spam detection software, it's just not 100% confident they're spammers, and it would rather err on the side of human intervention. They dont need deep investigation, they just need a sanity check. I know approval requests don't take 30 minutes to do 20 of them, because I've written an approval system for my own forum software, and the entire point is to be able to burn through them quickly. 20 in five minutes should be child's play. Thirty in 5 minutes should be leisurely.
In the case of a 'huge surge' throwing off my nice, averaged numbers? Something like 300 new approvals appearing between logins? Well, unless we have a random, obvious surge of new users OUTSIDE the ones the spam system isn't sure of, we probably didn't get linked to, we got a bot network pointed at us, easy shit, arm the nukes.
Or hell, even automate that further and use an SFS plugin or refine the config for an existing plugin if we have one and effectively eliminate probably ~90% of it and crush down the approval queue.
There are options here. They just need the staff, collectively, to do something, rather than nothing. I get that this is a call for help topic.... but there is no magic bullet here from the forum-goers. This is, frankly, an internal staff issue. You should be discussing with the rest of the staff if they're going to do their fair share of work, and if they aren't, explore replacements or additional staffing.
Staffing a forum does, in fact, require some work. It's one of the reasons why I gave up the adminship to people who supposedly *did* want to do that work, so we didn't have another Hawk situation.
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