2013 Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection

Question

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.

This is an alternative form of the Town Hall Chat system we've done in previous elections, we're trying some new things to test out how a different approach works.

This thread existed to collect questions. I'm happy to say that I'm very proud of the turnout. You can find the questionnare here.

Here's how it'll work.

• During the nomination phase, (so, until May 20th 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.

Answer 1

There has been a growing disconnect between long-time (usually high-rep) users and newer users. New users feel that the old timers are gruff and unfriendly. Long time users feel that the new users haven't put enough effort into solving their own problems before turning to Server Fault and that it's watering down the site. Obviously these are generalities and not all users fall into these two buckets, but the schism exists, nonetheless.

I, personally, feel that the abundance of "easy" questions by new users is ruining the site. It makes it seem that there's no knowledge to gain here for the high-rep users, or that the new knowledge is very hard to find in the sea of garbage. This seems to be causing less and less participation on the main site by these users and seems to be slowly bringing Server Fault down to the lowest common denominator. If this site can't keep the interest of current users who are subject matter experts, it won't easily be able to attract new ones to replace them. High quality content attracts high quality users and low quality users. Low quality content attracts only low quality users.

Do you agree with my assessment, and do you think that anything can or should be done about it? If so, what?

Answer 2

Server Fault moderators are occasionally greeted by the wretched underbelly of the internet - this includes your usual villains (spammers), but also occasionally less malicious types.

How would you deal with each of the following cases:

• A new user who is posting many off-topic questions
  (good quality, just not on-topic)
• A new user who is posting many poor-quality questions
  (poorly researched, "do my work for me", or generally not up to the minimum standard of professionalism)
• A user (new or established) arguing about a moderation decision
• A user (new or established) harassing other users

Answer 3

Server Fault has long held itself to be "a site for professionals" - our FAQ specifically calls this out:

Server Fault is for Information Technology Professionals needing expert answers related to managing computer systems in a professional capacity.

How do you define "in a professional capacity" in the context of this site?
What minimum standards of effort/professionalism do you intend to encourage as a moderator?

Answer 4

As shown by the other questions, discussions in the comms room, and the reason why one of the current moderators is resigning, the mood of the site is in flux and some people seem to be unsure/uncomfortable about where the site is going. As a moderator, your actions can have a lot of influence in the "mood" of the site and where the community is going.

In the nominations, every candidate has focused on what would make him a good moderator, but one thing I'd really like to know is: Where do you want ServerFault to go and how do you plan to help make it go there?

Answer 5

Most of the moderator candidates are participants in chat. I find that chat is actually the place on the site that holds the most value to me. I've started (been tricked into?!) a side consulting gig there. It is a place where meaningful discussions happen, as opposed to the main site, which I now feel holds little value to me short of a place to keep feeding my rep addiction. It feels like after you hit a certain level, the quality of the content on the main site doesn't add a lot to my professional knowledge. Chat is what keeps me coming back and keeps me learning new things.

What can we do to keep people like me engaged in the main site and not just chat? It seems like after a certain point, Q&A isn't enough for expert-level people. There needs to be design and architecture discussions to keep people at a high-level interested, but we all know that discussion is not allowed on main.

Is chat part of the natural "evolution" here, or can something be done to the main site to bring people like me back to it?

Answer 6

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?

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• 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?

Answer 7

Moderators have the ability to close questions without the concurring votes of other community members. In light of this, how (if at all) will you change the way you evaluate questions that might need to be closed?

Answer 8

One thing I really like about this site is that a lot of the moderators tend to hang out in the Comms Room. Answering questions, including historical knowledge of the site, or commenting on various questions to either illicit opinion on whether it is a good question for the site or to help clarify issues to users on the site. This sort of "live support" is a lot more receptive in today's "instant" world versus email.

While doing so is not explicitly required here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/ and nobody can expect a moderator to be available 24x7...

Do you (as a potential moderator) think that this is a valuable way for a moderator to participate on the site, and why?

Answer 9

Moderators have final authority for several things. Some of these are well known:

• Close votes
• Deletes
• Tag synonym suggestions

What is not well known is that Moderators also have final authority in the /review queues. Once a moderator has picked something, it's out of the queue one way or the other. The vasty closed-queue was emptied in large part because our existing mod-staff stepped in and helped muck out the stables; otherwise it would have taken a lot longer.

Now that the glut is passed, what is your policy for delving into the /review queues as a moderator?

Answer 10

Per here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/05/a-theory-of-moderation/

what provisions have you made to deter/correct when you get a rogue moderator?

Logging, primarily.. I am fairly anti-log, but in the case of moderator actions they are heavily logged.

Do you (as a moderator) think that your actions should be logged and metrics collected to evaluate your effectiveness and participation as a moderator?

As an analogy...think about teachers and "performance based pay". Should you as a moderator be considered a good moderator based on your performance or based on your tenure and likeability?

Answer 11

Fairly new to this site, so please bear with me if this is not quite adequate, or has been already answered elsewhere.

Given the rate of duplication in questions for some topics, canonical questions seems like the way to go, but, how would it be implemented? I'm asking about specifics here, like:

• (probably high-rep) users spot a canonical question opportunity
• a meta question is raised regarding that topic
• a (canonical) question is asked, trying to cover that frequently asked topic
• future questions are flagged as "canonicalisable", and the OP is pointed to the CQ

This is something I would invest time into, and some candidates have included it in their agenda.

Answer 12

Is there an administrative requirement to post on Server Fault? Do you need to be in control of policy, or is it enough to know your job (as a sysadmin)?

To give a concrete example, if a question asks how to bypass a firewall, does that automatically make it off-topic?