I would *not* use the online indicator as any sort of reliable indicator that if you PM a member of the support team that shows they are "on," you will receive an immediate response. I would basically ignore that indicator when it comes to support issues, because that's really not how the team works.

As it's been from the beginning (and if it ever changes, we'll surely let you know), everyone who is a member of our community support team -- moderators, super-moderators, and administrators -- is a volunteer. That means they do not get paid to be here and do moderating duties to help give back to the community they are a part of.

Because they do not get paid, we cannot assign "shifts" for moderators, and just rely on people meeting the expectation that if they agreed to be a moderator, they will log on regularly (most of our team logs on a multiple-times-a-day basis).

Community support team members can come from all around the world, but our current team is mostly US-based, with a few from the UK, and I think one or two from Canada. We are not all in the same time zones.

The community support team has its own forum where we discuss, on a daily basis, issues that are brought to our attention, reported threads, or reported problems in the chat rooms. We discuss the issue and reach a resolution for it, usually within 2-3 days (although some things can take as long as a week to resolve if it's complicated). That may seem like an eternity for some things.

For more straight-forward concerns, like spam or someone clearly posting against the guidelines, we will often temporarily close the thread or remove the offending post while we discuss it further. Primarily we're looking to keep things drama-free and keeping within the community guidelines within the community.

Yes, we *always* suggest you use the report triangle to report a post. Why? Because that starts a thread in the admin area about the post and spurs actions by the team to address it. If you, instead, try reporting the post to a single mod or admin, they may not log on until the next day and see it. Or they may read it and simply forget to act on it (everybody's human, so yeah, we sometimes forget things). Reporting a post with the triangle icon is the quickest way to get action on something. Period.

In most cases, we can't speed up the process because we work as a team for anything that isn't clear-cut. And that means waiting until different team members chime in. While this slows things down, it also assures we're acting in the fairest and most unbiased manner possible (e.g., no single moderator can play favorites or go rogue on us ).

We do not offer "immediate help" here in the community -- it's just not a part of the service we have.

Best,
DocJohn