2016 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

Like we've done in the past, in connection with the moderator elections, 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.

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

Here's how it'll work:

• During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, June 13th 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.

• We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.

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

• At the end of the 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. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.

• Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in total.

• 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

What timezone are you in and when will you be most active?

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Rationale: the moderators we have now cover quite a broad range of times throughout the day, but there are a handful of times when there are no moderators around (Friday evening, PST, for example).

Answer 2

The existing moderator team doesn't always agree in private (the joke is if you ask 10 people the same question, you'll get 15 answers).

What will you do if the majority of moderators are opposed to your point of view?

Answer 3

Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

• 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?

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• 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?

Answer 4

As the site gains more and more moderators, it will become increasingly important for the existing moderators to think and act alike so that we the laymen can can know what to expect, regardless of which moderator is acting. Describe your relationship with the present moderators and why you would expect them (and not just us) to trust you as a moderator as well.

Answer 5

What do you think about setting up something like the Stack Overflow Close Vote Reviewers chat room (SOCVR)? Aside from a recent surge in first posts, our close vote review queue has always been rather large. Every year or so, we see posts to clean it up:

• Clearing out the close review queue 2015
• Do we need a event to clear out the Close Queue?
• Shall we try and clean the close vote review queue to start the new year?

This has been suggested before, and IIRC, there is such a room, but inactive (and lacking publicity).

While having a room by itself is not the issue, the queue size is. It's been agreed repeatedly over the years that it's a problem and something needs to be done about it. Thoughts?

Answer 6

How do you deal with established users who have gained reputation, badges and privileges by illicit means?

This might seem silly but it has real world applications. Things like this, where >1k rep users do something really quite wrong, happen a couple of times a year. Dealing with it smoothly is important to the continued success of the site.

You are a moderator. A community mod from Stack Exchange comes to your mod-only chat room and tells you the news:

We've been working on the voting fraud mechanism. We have discovered that three of your highest rep users, Oli, fossfreedom and Luis Alvarado have all been using a carefully hidden network of sock-puppets to boost their reputation for years.

They have cheated the system out of hundreds of thousands points of reputation.

The system is certain they are guilty and there's no way they weren't aware of what was happening.

When confronted Luis was the only person who admitted there was a system in place and he also points to the others' guilt.

• Banning them or doing anything "too harsh" could mean they leave the site forever.
• Doing nothing, or being too lenient might show newer users that they can get away with stuff like this, as long as they're good at it.

What would you suggest happens next?

I know there isn't a single best answer —and your opinion may change when faced with it in reality— but I'd like to get the measure of the prospective moderators, at least how they feel they'd handle this if it happened today.

Answer 7

How would you deal with a feud between two users? Consider a case where two users have it in for each other and tend to downvote and/or negatively comment on each other's posts.

Answer 8

How would you deal with a problematic user who, while posting excellent answers/questions, tends to cause a lot of drama?

By "drama" I mean that this user's actions cause other users to complain, either by raising flags or in chat, that this user gets into arguments with other users; basically that the user's presence is detrimental to the smooth working of the site, despite the fact that their posts are useful.

Answer 9

How would you encourage users to improve their answer quality? For instance, someone who consistently copies another user's comments into an answer, more or less verbatim, without verifying that the information they're supplying is correct.

Answer 10

How do you distinguish Linux Mint and similar type products from the official Ubuntu family? What do you understand to be the differences that lead to them being out of scope on AskUbuntu?