2022 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

Question

The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

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Code Golf Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2022-09-26. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation. Participation is completely voluntary.

Here’s how it’ll work:

• Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2022-09-26 at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 4:00 pm EDT on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

• If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

• This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

• We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

  • How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
  • How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?

• The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

  • In your opinion, what do moderators do?
  • A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
  • In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?

• At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

  • We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
  • This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

A big part of moderation on this site is deleting invalid or non-competitive answers. It easily makes up more than half of the total work that needs to be done. Since this is site specific, none of the default questions address it but it's important for potential moderators to understand what they are volunteering for and important for the community to know how they will handle such a duty.

An answer is flagged for being non-competitive. It clearly took a lot of effort to make but it makes no attempt to meet the scoring criterion. What steps would you take as a moderator?

This is not a question about your opinions on such answers, but about how you plan to act as moderator.

Answer 2

A not insignificant portion of the site's active users participate in chat, especially The Nineteenth Byte. While we do have elected Room Owners for TNB, moderators have greater powers in chat than any other user, and are often looked to when resolving moderation disputes.

How active are you in chat, and how would you describe your approach to moderating a more informal setting than the site?

Answer 3

Moderators must sign an agreement whose terms include:

i. I will abide by the current Code of Conduct (which is a part of this agreement), and enforce it to the best of my ability.
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iv. I will abide by all other officially announced moderator and user policies made available to me.
v. I will accept additional guidance given by members of the Stack Exchange, Inc. Community Team and Senior Leadership Team, whether in response to questions, concerns or discussions regarding existing network-wide policies.

How would you respond if a policy or company directive (current or future) seems to conflict with your beliefs and ideals?

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^{Taken from xnor's answer from the last election. While the events that inspired the question are less recent than before, I believe the question is no less relevant, and so deserves to be asked}

Answer 4

You've taken what you feel is a reasonable moderation action, but another user brings up an analogous situation in the past where an opposite action was taken, which was also reasonable at the time. How would you react to this user's complaint?

Answer 5

Recently, we've closed several older questions in favour of newer ones that are less strict.

A new user posts a question that is an exact duplicate of a much older question. However, it's much less strict than the original and allows classes of answers/languages that wouldn't be possible otherwise. What would you do in this situation?