At the rate traffic is increasing, I've been thinking it won't bee too long before we do need more moderators. However I don't think we're quite there yet.
Since CSE is a graduated site, WHO gets put into the mix will be decided be the election process like we already went through once. I have a few picks of my own, but I'll get the same one vote you will.
It's seems to be normal for moderator elections to be a yearly affair on an as needed basis. The SE moderator communiques sometimes have reminders that existing mods should speak up if they are overworked and they will fire up elections or do what it takes to not completely burn out their volunteers. My personal opinion is that by the time we hit the year mark well probably be starting to be stretched and opening up an election with a couple slots available will be a good thing.
In the mean time, I think there are some healthy transitions happening that should be encouraged to continue for a while yet. The community is learning to moderate itself a bit.
- More questions are getting closed, fixed, and opened without moderator intervention.
- More new users are being shown the ropes by old hands (that don't have diamonds).
- More problems are becoming self mitigating as users learn how they are dealt with.
There is still room for improvement in there areas.
The progress that has been made is in large part in thanks to a handful of active and vocal users (yourself included!) who are setting the pace, explaining issues with posts, leading the voting so that others can follow in the queues, and so forth. I would hate to see this progress stalled by taking a couple of those most effective folks and giving them diamonds. Sure a lot of stuff like deletion of NAA material would happen more definitively, but I'm not sure this would be all good. Nobody would see it happen. There would be no example to follow. Newer community members would not realize that it is their job to moderate this site.
In the mean time I don't yet see a need for more or faster moderator action. Moderators are supposed to be exception handlers, but things are working well enough that there are few exceptions these days. We haven't had to send anybody to their corners lately, and only a handful of mod messages have had to be sent out. Nothing that has needed serious intervention is going down frequently enough that we haven't been able to handle it out of hand. What remains is mostly janitorial. Deleting NAA stuff being the big one. Not enough folks have or use delete votes on new posts that have wandered out of the reservation. This task however is actually pretty easy. If I don't hit refresh pretty frequently they will go by and get completed by another mod in short order. Our flag handling time is pretty short. If, when flagging, the community has done its job and commented appropriately it's pretty easy to clear the queue.
I would be interested in hearing other perspectives. If it feels to you like we are overworked, maybe you are basing that on some observation on the site. Maybe there are things being overlooked? What do you see that could be improved?
TL:DR; I agree we are eventually going to need more hammers, but I think it would be healthier to wait a few months yet and give some other trends (like the community finding its feet commenting and voting to achieve the same ends a moderator could but cooperatively instead of unilaterally) time to bear fruit (in this case enough trained and active community leaders to lead the next charge).