What is the chat room "Topic editors" used for?

It’s specifically for discussing the process of editing topics on questions. We’re in the process of cleaning them up and this new feature is in very limited beta with a small group of people. We have the ability to revert and there are logs of everything that goes on…eventually those logs may be public. The point of the whole process is to make “questions for you” more consistent, make it easier to find topics you’re looking for and fix the spelling and capitalization errors in existing topics. The reason we’re not expanding this group right away is we’re working on coming up with a clear, logical and consistent set of guidelines on editing topics.

So far I’m been super-impressed at the effort and thought going into cleaning topics up. Things are getting much better, pretty rapidly: for example if you put relationships in your profile you will now be matched all relationship-related questions. Before you’d miss the ones tagged with “relationship”, “Relationships.”, “relationship.”, etc.

The “Topic editors” chat is exactly that – a chatroom for Fluther’s topic editors. We use this chatroom to discuss and debate about topics aka tags that are used on questions. This chat really shouldn’t be a place where everyone comes and has casual conversation – that’s what the Watering Hole is for!

What are “topic editors” exactly? They’re jellies who have been given the ability to add, edit, and remove topics aka tags on questions.

I was wondering the same thing earlier. I even almost went in to check it out (guess it’s a good thing I didn’t). Thanks @timtrueman and @chels for the info!

I thought only moderators could add, edit or remove topics, has that changed?

@rooeytoo Correct, we drafted in some non-moderator help to deal with questions like this and this…

@timtrueman – I didn’t know that, how many and who are these people?

@rooeytoo There’s 18 people (well not counting Fluther staff or moderators) in the current group. It’s (just some of) people we thought would be good at it. We’ll expand that once we work out some of the bugs and make it more usable. If you’re interested in helping send me a PM and when we add to the group we’ll consider you for it (depends on how many more people we add and other factors).

@timtrueman – thanks for the offer but my schedule is too erratic to be available when needed. Are you not worried that soon you will have more chiefs than indians? It seems as if the flagging function should take care of anything the moderators don’t catch. I am just curious why this is necessary?

@rooeytoo You will have to wait and see for now…mum’s the word.