My name is Dmitry.
- 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).
I am in UTC+3. I do not have a fixed working/life schedule. I visit the site at almost random times, including late at night, weekends, etc.
- 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.
This moderation policy of this site is great so far. I see no reason act a different way. If there are doubts what do do in a specific case, a restricted chat for moderators is always available I guess.
- 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?
I would resolve the flags and contact the user asking them to change the behavior. If that does not help, I would keep resolving flags ;-) Untill it is not unacceptably offencive, I would not do anything like bans, etc. But it is a matter of discussion beween moderators.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
I would try to resolve the issue with that mod in a private chat.
- 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?
I will argue ;-) but accept the majority decision.
- 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?
This year the Close Vote queue is not that long. It used to be too long because not many people did reviewing. A chat room can't solve this problem. I am on the second place all time in the Close View and I do not feel like I need anything but the queue itself. But if it is helpful for other people, why not?
- 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.
I would talk to these users and try to calm this down. Anyway serial downvoting is to be reverted automatically. I would remove some offending posts. Life shows that this does not last long in most cases.
- 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.
The main point is that the goal of this site is to generate high-quality content (Q&A). The scoring system (rep, badges, etc.) is one of the means of reaching this goal. It is not sports as some people may think where the score is most important.
That's why I do not think that we could sacrifice good users in favor of purity of the score system.
SE is designed a way that illegal activity should be detected automatically and illegal votes to be reverted. This does not work perfectly as we all know. In some cases manual actions are needed, or some scripts to be run.
It is important to revert illegal votes in time. It is not good to revert thousands of votes after year(s) of illegal voting.
Illegal activities should be detected and escalated as soon as possible. I know that it easier to be said than to be done, but anyway.
Mods can contact the suspects, try to talk to them and escalate the problems to admins, if the activity does not stop. It should be done as soon as possible.
Also a temporary voting ban may be useful. But I am afraid this function is not available at SE.
- 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.
I do not think anything special is to be done. I would comment on such posts and delete them.
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
I think that moderators mostly resolve flags, do reviewing and resolve issues with problematic users.