online forum moderators for a specific forum

[Deleted]

When I get an idea for a thread, I often find that before I post it, it would be useful to ask a moderator whether the thread is actually feasible and wouldn't immediately degrade in a cesspit of trolling, flaming and spamming. this most usually happens in off-topic. however, I find that if I want to get a reasonably fast response, I should PM a moderator who is online. to find one at this moment, I need to go to the forum and then click every moderator name at the bottom until I find one that is online. this can be troublesome, especially on forums with more than 5 or so mods. in addition, I feel like some moderators (especially super moderators and administrators) are too ... high on the ranking to ask such questions. i'd imagine Bibi gets a lot of PM's every day, and Sunshine probably as well, and i don't want to bother them with such, rather mundane questions. of course, I could always visit the IRC, but I'm not quite ready for that just yet.

for example: currently, I'm pondering on a discussion thread about relationships between brothers and sisters or cousins, and while it's not immediately a topic that's can be found under the forbidden topics, I feel it's definitely one that could rapidly degrade into insults and flaming (also, a bit off-topic, but thoughts on such a thread from moderators would be appreciated, even if they're not from off-topic).

if I want a second opinion on the above topic, for example, I've got 7 moderators to check the profile of to check if one of them is online so I can ask this. and what if I wanted to have a second opinion on a MoP related topic (like i had recently), of which the forum has 12 moderators?. in contrast, I think it could be pretty easy to show a green/white orb next to the name to show if they're online.

thoughts on this matter (i mean the sometimes dull search for an online moderator)?

[Sunshine]

Yeah, it would be nice if we had a better way of showing that. We do have the general list of people online on the main forum page where you can see some mods, although it doesn't list which forum they mod.

You're totally welcome to PM me -- I do get a bunch of PMs, but they're usually the quick-answer kind, so I'm pretty available.