In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. We only selected the top voted questions, however, due to one of the questions being rather matching to one of the fixed stock questions, I've opted to merge the question into it, and have thus only ended up with 7 submissions. We thus added one of our backup questions to bring us to 10 questions.
As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes. Oh, and please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written.
Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.
Good luck to all of the candidates!
- What timezone are you in and when will you be most active? 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).
- 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.
- How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable questions/answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags in comments and chat?
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
- 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?
- 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: 1 2 3. 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?
- 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.
- 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. Example scenario.
- 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.
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?