Seems like the moderators have a HUGE backlog of unapproved posts due to the sheer volume and traffic of E621.

This is one of the oldest posts I could find that's unapproved:

https://e621.net/post/show/1762895/2019-anthro-areola-avian-beak-bird-bottomless-brea

I don't know, I just feel bad for the volunteers who have to sift through everything with this huge amount just piling up.

Is there anything us normal users can do to help?

Other than taking on more site administrators to speed up the process, which would require trusted individuals being picked from a large number of users, all that can be done is standard users making sure they upload within the guidelines so there are less things necessary for deliberation or deletion. That linked post there is 17 days old, but I think up to a month is the time frame for approval, so I wouldn't worry about it too much yet anyway. If it results in valid posts being automatically deleted, it might be a cause for concern at that point.

I mean, yeah, but at the same time it's like TwistedLogik just said.

This is actually reason why I requested the new upload form idea, which would cut down some bad uploads, which would cut down time used for flags of those uploads and Kira has done amazing job thus far:
https://e621.net/post/upload?use_new=true
forum #256093

If you do see someone who could be able to provide assistant as janitor, you can also report users for being extremely helpful. It's still work which requires some level of knowledge and responsibility so we can't just appoint first person to raise their hand for that.

R0GU3T1G3R said:
This is one of the oldest posts I could find that's unapproved:

That's because it's bad so I skipped it once and handled more clear cases first.

There is always a huge backlog. They'll get approved. Most of the oldest posts are unapproved because none of us feel like firmly declaring that this piece is, or isn't good enough. Like I said the other day, 60% of posts are approved nearly right away, and within a week, there tends to only be 10-20 left that are kind of like the really dark potato chip that you've been eating around for the last few days. (we should just toss it out but no one likes being the bad guy all the time and it's *really* tiring to have to explain, often right to the artist, that it's not quite up to our standards...)

It's not nice to feel like the bad guy all the time, y'know?

But it's not heaping up. it's a big incoming, but we've been keeping the outgoing going too, y'know? just, we've been busy the last little bit! I'm getting over a bout of death, and I know that a few people have been working frantically on some really time consuming projects.

That said, we do have a neato interface that lets us look at the pending posts, so we don't need left over posts pointed out to us--but thank you! :D

That said... hmm... how can a user help....

well, the best thing I can think of off hand is to help make sure that posts have the right info.

Good sourcing is one of the most important things to us. Making sure that a picture has a source is important. And there could be a lot of words typed about how to source things, but I don't have enough time to go on about that. But, we like it if a post has a source to the image (the actual submission page, not just the artist's gallery) on as many image galleries as possible. (so, FA, deviantart, weasyl, IB, etc).. That helps us make sure that we've got the best version available.

Past that, we spend a lot of time doing stupid stuff like tagging characters and artists annd just adding tags to things. like.. if you search rating:e -penis -pussy -balls -anus there are a LOT of things that have those sorts of things but don't have the tags. (not that ALL of them should have them, but, generally speaking.

seriously, jsut helping with tags helps a lot. I die a little bit whenever I see someone who's uploaded a post like with 10 tags and hasn't bothered to tag breasts or whatever. or gender tags at all: -male -female -intersex -ambiguous_gender

in the end, every little bit helps <3 Every user can help out a whole lot if they want to. There's not much that can be done for the queue, but help is help <3

Mairo said:
I mean, yeah, but at the same time it's like TwistedLogik just said.

This is actually reason why I requested the new upload form idea, which would cut down some bad uploads, which would cut down time used for flags of those uploads and Kira has done amazing job thus far:
https://e621.net/post/upload?use_new=true
forum #256093

If you do see someone who could be able to provide assistant as janitor, you can also report users for being extremely helpful. It's still work which requires some level of knowledge and responsibility so we can't just appoint first person to raise their hand for that.

That's because it's bad so I skipped it once and handled more clear cases first.

What are the terms of eligibility for a janitor? If i come across anyone who meets the terms of eligibility id let them know.

R0GU3T1G3R said:
What are the terms of eligibility for a janitor? If i come across anyone who meets the terms of eligibility id let them know.

Generally whoever is already spending their time on improving the site, were it sourcing, tagging, uploading, etc. and doing it extremely well.

Because we do also have privileged and contributor statuses, which give more tools and ease on restrictions to do things on the site, contributors also have their posts autoapproved which of course eases with approval queue for janitors.

Also there are so many seperate things we have here, so someone who wants to translate content won't benefit from being over contributor, those who only want to upload content won't help much being above contributor.