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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, July 6th 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 new process, feel free to post as a comment here.

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Sensitive Posts

A question is flagged: Please delete this question - my boss has seen it and says it contains confidential code - he's freaking out and wants me to remove it, but I can't delete it

The question was asked 3 days before, it has 2 answers, one is accepted.

How do you respond?

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Moderating Chat

As a moderator on Code Review you will also become a moderator on all of chat.stackexchange.com - which has rooms for most sites (all except Stack Overflow and Meta.StackExchange).

A heated discussion is flagged in "The Suspension" chat room which is associated with BridgeBuilding.stackexchange.com - there is swearing and name calling.

What do you do?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I really want to ask some clarification questions, but I think that is part of what you are looking for in this question.... \$\endgroup\$
    – Malachi Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 20:31
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What do you think about the new possibilities of migration coming with graduation?

This is one of the questions that are extremely interesting to me. Graduation means we will get the ability to migrate questions away by community vote. It also means we may end up on the migration path of other sites.

These user-migrations can be notoriously bad (see the old programmer's dilemma). I personally fear they will be. This means an additional moderation duty and quite possibly drama with other sites on the network...

How would you address problems coming up with large-scale low-quality user migrations?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Very good question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Heslacher
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 7:44
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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 five-vote process? Why?

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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?
  • 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?
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A user has an issue with an action you, as moderator, took; calling you out on meta, a chat room, comments, or otherwise. How do you handle this?

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Moderators don't vote. They decide.

Making binding decisions instead of voting will be a paradigm shift for nearly all of the nominees. How do you plan on making this adjustment?

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Dependability, and Constancy

As one of the Revivalists, I have seen some users come through chat that are active and excited about Code Review, and they do well for months at a time, but then they drop off the face of the planet Code Review, sometimes they come back and some haven't come back yet.

Are you in it for the long haul?

Are you going to stick with us for the long haul?

Are you ready to spend hours on Code Review, just for the love of the site?

Are you Addicted to Code Review?

How can you show us that you are serious about Code Review?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Haha, the exact reason why I will never nominate myself :) \$\endgroup\$
    – Morwenn
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 15:45
  • \$\begingroup\$ For the record, the correct answers are: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. \$\endgroup\$
    – Nic
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 19:58
  • \$\begingroup\$ @QPaysTaxes, the last question wasn't a yes/no question.... \$\endgroup\$
    – Malachi Mod
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 20:18
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Malachi I'm very well aware. That's the joke... I try to avoid influencing the answers candidates give \$\endgroup\$
    – Nic
    Commented Jun 30, 2015 at 20:19
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Code Review has approximately at 15-to-1 upvote-to-downvote ratio, nearly double Stack Overflow's approximate 8-to-1 ratio.

As a moderator, you'll be regularly viewing the worst of the worst posts made to Code Review.

Do you consider up and down voting of a moderation tool at all? Do you think you downvote enough questions? Do you think you upvote enough questions?

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    \$\begingroup\$ Every user's lifetime vote count is public knowledge. Other than that, how you vote is, I believe, a private matter. Moderators have no special upvote/doe vote privileges. So how is one's voting pattern relevant to one's performance in a moderator role? \$\endgroup\$
    – 200_success
    Commented Jul 1, 2015 at 2:19
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    \$\begingroup\$ Like editing, voting to close, and a few other tools, I consider up/downvoting (particularly downvoting questions) one of many tools of moderation. How a user is using the tools of moderation they already have available to them can hint at how they will use an expanded tool set. \$\endgroup\$
    – nhgrif
    Commented Jul 1, 2015 at 2:20
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    \$\begingroup\$ The candidate could disagree with the premise that up/down voting is a tool of moderation at all. That'd be a perfectly fine answer. \$\endgroup\$
    – nhgrif
    Commented Jul 1, 2015 at 2:27

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