2021 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.

---

Arqade is scheduled for an election next week, 2021-08-02. 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 2021-08-02 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 fellow moderator takes an action the community disagrees with, and the community takes it to meta. You also disagree with the moderators decision. What do you do?

Relatedly, what would you do if you were the moderator who took action the community disagreed with in the above situation?

Answer 2

You (a moderator) and another community member both answer a question on the main site. The other answer is well written but (objectively) incorrect, and has gathered a similar amount of upvotes to yours. What do you do?

Answer 3

Which moderation tool do you use most often during your average day on Arqade? Which do you use least often? Do you see that changing in case you get elected?

Answer 4

Moderators are not selected because they are domain experts in certain tags, but it so happens that you are an expert in one such tag. You see that several members of the community have elected to close a question as a duplicate, but you see that the duplicates don't actually answer the question as stated, nor do they provide a useful signpost for the asker. How do you proceed?

Answer 5

There is a high-rep user who is very active on the site, but frequently uses strong language which violates the Code of Conduct in their comments. When you warned them, they replied stating that the questions are of low quality which is why they left those comments. They also threatened to quit the site. Despite the warning, they continue to post similar comments. What steps, if any, will you take in order to address this situation? What if the comments were on Meta instead of main? Does that change your approach at all?