Locked post with no answer

Thanks Vox Moduli, I updated that one!

We definitely need a process for handling these, so I created a form to report any issues with locked posts. You can find that here: https://forms.gle/ywp4TMX2JjtvyuyU9

Thank you for getting back to me. I'll favorite that in the future. Can you make a post on the public forum (if you haven't already) providing that link? I'll hang onto it as well as I can, but it's possible I could lose it. Additionally, keep it available in case another user wants to use it. Hopefully you can implement a more formal system (I'm thinking "More" > "Request Unlock") on the question, then a small menu similar to the flag menu.

Additionally, I made two errors whilst going on my flagging sprees. Will this be an issue? My error rate is not likely to be above 0.3% or so, but I've hit the wrong post with a flag once or twice. Hopefully this will not be too much of an issue.

If I may be so bold, would you be willing to reveal your action throughput, and report quantity on a per-month basis? I'm very curious about the scale of the Guardian program and I intend to join if my application is accepted. Currently I'm just flagging things and was wondering if my 2100 flags in the past week is noticeable. The minimum requirements for Guardian actions seemed a bit low.

Yes, a built-in feature would be ideal but we're not likely to see any new discussion features in the near future. Hopefully this system will work for now! Feel free to share that link with any other users.

No, accidentally flagging isn't an issue. We'll just remove the flags if the post looks fine.

I'm not sure of the exact numbers here, but I'd say on average I process just myself a few thousand posts every day. That varies a bit based on what other issues come up though. Plus there's several other people who are actively reviewing content, so we're processing many times more than that a day. I plan to thoroughly read through your other thread and provide a bit more information about this there, I just haven't had a chance yet.

We're not actively reviewing applications for the Guardian program (this likely won't happen until closer to the end of the year) but you're still welcome to apply! For each round of recruiting we always look back at all the old applications and reach out to users that are still active that we think would be a good fit.

Thanks for giving that insight, it helps me a lot to understand the scope. Are you a paid employee? Thousands is quite a bit higher than I expected. I created my own extension to enhance my flagging workflow, and I'm still not likely to get more than a few hundred a day given other responsibilities. Then again, filtering from decent posts probably takes more time than final judgement on a most-likely bad post. I'm considering adding to my extension a storage feature so you could potentially train an LLM or run some sort of analytics on it, unless that's something you're already doing with your officially moderated post data. As much as I would like to be a Guardian to help out, it would be even better if your workload could be reduced to the point that you only need a couple supervising Guardians. How do I indicate continued interest in the Guardian program and show updates in my progress? I've already nearly doubled the stated flag numbers in my application and I want to show that I haven't fallen out of activity in the intervening months.

Side question: are there any offsite Khan Academy communities that I could find likeminded people in? I find the Support site a bit clunky, and there's not always a place to put commentary.

Evan, I'd like to refine my flagging... I feel like a post with < 5 words, poor grammar, bad spelling, etc. could generally be flagged as low quality, but I didn't want to overflag things that are under your radar. Are there any enhanced guidelines with examples for edge cases?

Take this one for example:

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computers-and-internet/xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:online-data-security/xcae6f4a7ff015e7d:introduction-to-online-data-security/a/why-does-data-security-matter?qa_expand_key=ag5zfmtoYW4tYWNhZGVteXJBCxIIVXNlckRhdGEiHmthaWRfMjE3NjI1NTQ0MTI0ODQ0MTY4OTAwNDY4MAwLEghGZWVkYmFjaxiAgKuNv-CSCgw&qa_expand_type=question

Maybe there is some of the materials used to train new Guardians that could be made available to some of us hard-working volunteers to help us distinguish which posts are truly against Guidelines and which should be left alone rather than flagged.

We'll post an announcement in News & Updates when we start actively recruiting, so you can always submit another (updated) application at that point if you feel your achievements have changed by then.

We don't have any detailed sets of guidelines/examples of bad posts, but in general if you think the post is unhelpful or irrelevant to the course content then you can flag it. We can always just approve it if we think it's fine. The example you gave seems too vague to be helpful for others, so yes that's something that could be flagged. The 6th ELA course is a cleaned up course, so you could look at that for examples of posts that we have approved and cleaned up (the locked posts, not any very recent ones).

For now, I'd say don't flag posts that are helpful but are short, poor grammar, misspelling, etc. We'll eventually get to those as part of the discussion cleanup project, and we can edit them to fix all of those things if the post is otherwise helpful. *Although note that we're prioritizing the highest traffic courses first, so it could be quite a while for some courses to see these improvements.

I'm sure there's other communities that exist if you search around, but I'm not aware of or part of any myself. Schoolhouse is another pretty cool place for those that are interested in peer tutoring.

Just meant another place to communicate, not necessarily for peer tutoring. Some years ago I used Discord for casual communication.

I will happily become a volunteer if there are still positions avaible.

Evan Lewis,

In posts in this thread 7 months ago, you wrote that Khan Academy would "post an announcement in News & Updates when we start actively recruiting" for Guardians again, and also that "actively reviewing applications for the Guardian program ... likely won't happen until closer to the end of the year".  It's now over a month after the end of 2025.  Is there any update on when more Guardians will get recruited?  

Evan Lewis

How can we get an update on when Guardian recruitment might happen?  Last summer you wrote that it would probably be closer to the end of 2025, but it's now March 2026.

JaniceHolz I checked with the current program lead and they said recruitment is currently on hold due to some unknowns about upcoming product changes that may impact discussions. However, the program is going to be managed by a different KA staff member in a few months, so it's possible there may be some recruitment then, but I can't guarantee anything. I requested that the Guardian program info article gets updated to reflect this.

Evan Lewis

Thanks for the response and the information.  It looks like the article "How can I become a Guardian and what does this entail?" was updated today, but does not have any wording indicating when recruitment will happen:

We are not currently recruiting new Guardians. However, you can apply at any time and we will review your application once the next round of recruiting occurs! If you've applied and you haven't heard back from us, don't worry, it will be reviewed!

As far as I can remember, the paragraph might be the same as it has been for months. 
I was hoping there would be some wording in the article indicating the earliest recruitment is anticipated (such as "Recruitment is on hold until at least June, maybe longer."), so people would have some information.

JaniceHolz It think it previously said something about applications being reviewed on a yearly basis. As it currently stands, there's not an established timeframe for when recruiting may occur. There was a recent audit of the program though, so once that is reviewed and a recruitment timeline is established I will ask about updating again to provide more specific information.

Ok, thanks.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the article gives us very little useful information about when recruiting will happen, but I am glad that it's accurate.