2024 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 Review Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2024-03-12. 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 2024-03-12 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 enough reputation to access moderator tools or become a trusted user?

• 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

Not an answer flags

An answer in the style of "This is my approach / This is what I ended up with: (Code-dump)" is flagged as "Not an answer". What do you do? Is there a difference in how you respond if you see that the answer has a post notice (set by another moderator) on it?

_{Borrowed from Simon Forsberg in 2018}

Answer 2

Theory of moderation changes

There currently is a push underway to reevaluate what the role of a moderator should be in the SE network. Has this impacted your decision to run for moderator? What is your idea of what a moderator should be?

Answer 3

Site activity has been going downhill for years. Where we had 1500-2000 posts a month in '19, it's 400-700 a month since the start of '23. There are various reasons for this and Code Review is not the only site where numbers have gone down significantly.

Do you consider this a problem? Will becoming a moderator help you improve the situation?

Answer 4

Question closure / dealing with upset users

Suppose that you closed a question, which angers the original poster, who calls you a power-tripping moderator. How do you respond?

The implicit question is, under what circumstances would you use your moderator privilege to close questions, bypassing the [three]-vote process? Why?

_{Borrowed from 200_success in 2015
Borrowed from Phrancis in 2018}

Answer 5

This site gets a lot of off-topic questions, since its rules are more complicated than other sites on the network. Is this something best left to the community to handle, or is there more that moderators should be doing to migrate, fix, close or remove questions?

Answer 6

Do you have any particular philosophies on moderation or curation that might set you apart from other candidates?

_{Borrowed from D.W. (MSO) in 2024}