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Not sure if I got the name right, but I'm just wondering: What do I do if I want editorship to something that has no active editors on it? Ex: I want access to an article, but one of the editors is deactivated and the other hasn't had activity in almost a year. Would I PM an able mod to do this?

Also, just so this thread won't go to waste, what if it was made a place where people could ask for editorships to articles like these? Just a suggestion.

PM a higher level mod, they should be able to grant you editorship.

No to the request thread. I've been told by a couple people that most mods already ignore the request emails they're sent, so I doubt they'd pay much attention to the thread. Just PM, it gets attention better.

All editorship requests go through mods regardless (same with suggestions), so we look over all of them. And I refute the notion that we just ignore them, we take editorship requests seriously. If we think a person deserves editorship, we will give them it.

And I refute the notion that we just ignore them, we take editorship requests seriously. If we think a person deserves editorship, we will give them it.

Tell that to opspe. He's mentioned a few times before that he just ignores/deletes the requests and doesn't even look at them.

I'm glad you do your job on that though, Random 21.

Yes, I admit I direct all such emails to the trash. The reason is that people tend to spam them, or request for stupid reasons. If someone's serious about editing an entry, they should talk to the mods via PM or IRC. That's what I did before I became a mod, and believe me, it worked WAY better than doing the editorship request thing.

Most people who really know how to edit an entry and are motivated to do so are using that method already anyways, because they know it works better and quicker than an editorship request ever will.

Opspe did it, VanManner did it, and Mr. Scratch is doing it now.

With spam and the most retarded reasons possible filling up the requests, you quickly stop bothering reading them all, and most will end up in the trash. I of course read some of my mails, but far from all. Maybe not really a proper example I'm sending out, but I also don't always have the time to read them.

So I really am the only mod who reads them? Huh, go figure

This is surprisingly true. When I figured out that editor requests were worthless, I have gotten access to all of the entries that I don't start myself through wall posts or PMing. I've only been succesful using the request button once.

Yup. The button is only just a few marks above pointless, thanks to Random 21.

Anyway, questions answered and admissions made. Thread lock?

Pretty much yeah. But before it gets locked, I'd like to express my disappointment. Yes I understand that the spam is annoying, and yes, valid requests are few and far between, but does that really mean they should be ignored altogether? What's the point of having the feature if we just ignore it? Not all users think to contact mods, so we could potentially be missing out a lot of help in this respect. It may be time consuming, but we should at least make the effort. I think that just passing off with "Proper editors know that it's not a good way to request editorship" is a pathetic reason to be honest. I said what I said earlier because I thought we were better than that.

It's kinda impossible to defend ourselves here. If I wanted, I probably could pull up some better defenses, but that still wouldn't excuse myself. Sorry Random 21, but we failed on our side. Turns out you're one of our best mods. But things like this are really the type of stuff to put in the Mod Review Thread. As you said yourself in there, advice from fellow mods.

So if you don't mind, I am going to leave it open a bit longer for that matter.

As for the feature itself. Mods receive all requests, users only receive those of entries they're an editor of. So although we fail, an active user might still add someone to his/her entry.

Like we have discussed before, I still think that a separate on-site inbox should be created for editorship requests. Random 21 is awesome for reading through his e-mails and acknowledging requests, but it's simply impractical for most people.

For reference, I do get all editorship mail as well (modmail lol), and I read all suggestions and requests; not really because it's my job but it just interests me (plus I can point out particularly interesting ones to mods in IRC for their opinions). While many of them are valid, it's hard to take some of these editorship requests seriously (names removed, of course):

Counter-Strike:

adsadsafgzdegrfgahFBSNFSWN

An article for a major EVE battle:

Hey, can I help?

(How or why exactly?)

Natalia Poklonskaya:

All heil glorious leader waifu.

Also I'll occasionally see an extremely passive-agressive demand for editorship, sometimes not even passive, along the lines of "so will you give me editorship already?" – my first instinct would be to refuse that kind of request unless they had a really good reason.

I'm not saying that no good editors come out of requests, but the quality seems much lower overall than those that go directly to moderation.

I guess in this way, we could at least try and encourage these users to post more informative requests about how exactly they wish to help. It may not fix the problem, but it could certainly help (and make it more worthwhile to read the requests and suggestions).

Yes, there is a plenty amount of shit mails we receive. But I've been checking all requests/suggestions. That's because I had several mistakes in past.

For example, Cardboard Box Gundam article. As shown by that, we succeeded to get the comment from the cardboard box gundam guy himself. However, we had ignored his requests for a long time. I wasn't a moderator at that time and believed I didn't need to do anything because staffs or moderators would notice it and give him the editorship. But nothing was happened till I did it. In other case, I sent a reply to a request mail to ask staffs whether I'm allowed to give it to the sender. But there was no reaction. I couldn't do anything, and the sender, seemed quite kind for us, has been quiet since after that.

My activity as a moderator is a bit different from that of others. So yeah, it may not be a common case. But yet, I assume we've lost much more motivated users/helpful advises than that you thought.

Of course, I won't say we moderators must pay more attention to this issue. We're nothing more than volunteers. It must be improved by the admin/system side.

Well, you have this thread about sending requests and suggestions, which you can rewrite or expand on if you wish so.

Glad to see someone else felt this was an issue that needed to be addressed. Here, let me quote what I wrote in that Mod Review thread:

I’ve sent suggestions to I don’t even know how many articles (not as much recently though) and it’s rare that any changes are made. Occasionally I’ll just send the suggestion as a editorship request, but out of the last 12 request I’ve made, only one has been granted. I chalk that up to emails getting lost in the void, but Idk, maybe I don’t deserve to edit any of them. Still, that’s a less than 10% approval rate

While yes, I agree I've ignored editorship request in the past, most of those were to popular articles like the MLP page which is too popular to toy with. Users have to write a little more than "I am a huge fan of my little pony and want to help." when they've just joined the website. Still, some of the smaller articles should have less lenient standards for approval when harm wouldn't really come of it.

I feel some of these are being flat out ignored or forgotten and would benefit from a thread. We have plenty of articles that could use help and not enough actually being done about them.

I myself have sent in several request, and 2 of those recently for the TF2 article which hasn't been updated since 2012. To put that in perspective, there is no mention about the Saxxy Awards in the article and since 2012, Source Filmmaker and MvM have come out. It's a little over do for SOME work. I saved a recent copy of one of my request. Do tell me what more could be added to make it more "informative" if we need more informative request.

There's nothing about the Saxxy Awards in here which was created to honor all the great
machinima videos. That and the Machinima section could use a mention of the
Source Filmmaker being recently favored for video making as well as the inclusion of
one or two videos like "'Erectin a Sentry" and "Team Fabulous 2."

It may not be the most well written of request, but I try to make my request more than one sentence and state my objective in some manner. Again, "out of the last 12 request I’ve made, only one has been granted." How can this be true and yet every request is getting read?

tl;dr: +1 for editorship request thread