I think due to what happened here: Congratulations on being mentioned on Futurama's Facebook page!, or most probably here: https://www.facebook.com/Futurama/posts/320014191418612
We are getting MANY futurama posts within the past few minutes.
How can these be moderated fluently?
Many of them seem very VERY spammy.
(Yay to my flagging score going up and up and uppp!)
This reminds me of how the hostile atheists flooded the Christianity.se site asking the dumbest questions. (Don't get me wrong, they weren't all dumb. The ones I'm talking about were there with the express purpose of being rude, disruptive, and disrespectful. Some very smart atheists frequent the site and keep it interesting in a good way.)
I don't think the Futurama posters are intentionally hostile, but the questions are dragging the site down - duplicates, easily answered by a single link, just plain dumb. (How do you make ice cream soup? really?) It makes it hard to find the good questions, which dumbs down an otherwise fun S.E. site.
The mods, and other contributors that wanted to see the Christianity site succeed got it under control over several months by enlisting the aid of the community, endless chats about the best way to enforce the standards, and setting the tone for what's acceptable by setting up meta posts about undesired behavior, and closing questions aggressively, with links back to the Meta posts explaining "if you want to know how to get your post reopened, click here".
It took a while to find the right balance between over-aggressiveness and allowing interesting questions that "seekers" would really ask, but they did find a good balance eventually.
The key was in enlisting all the "regulars" in playing an active role in educating newbies to the standards, and enforcing them with down-votes and close votes. I think that the long discussions, which led to the various Meta guidelines were the key in improving the tine and quality of the questions in the face of openly hostile posters.
The Futurama people may not be openly hostile, but the quality of the questions is equally low in many cases. I think there are parallels here, and the danger of the site being drawn down to a truly awful, un-enjoyable level is here as well.
Hopefully, it won't be necessary to go that far. I'm hoping the ones asking the inane questions will get bored and move on, while the ones asking good questions stick around.
We mods are doing what we can, anyone with the rep to do so should help out by going through flags, voting to close, up and down voting, and adding comments guiding the many new users to the FAQ.
Looks like half an hour ago the Futurama Facebook page linked to Answerama.
