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Travel Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election starting next week, February 13th. In connection with that election, we will be hosting a Q&A here for 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:

  • Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, February 13th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 3:00 pm EST 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.

  • 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.

  • At the end of the collection 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 (up to) 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 process, feel free to post as a comment here.

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    Note - the election is set currently for 2 slots but that isn't fixed. The moderators made a request for an election but the count of slots was planned to be discussed by tomorrow. I decided to start the Q&A anyway because the slot count of the election can be changed as needed once the decision is made.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Feb 6, 2017 at 20:01
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    Sorry for the delay in response here - the community can speak with the moderators if they want to express that they think there may be need for more or less. But since the moderator count is largely based on the moderator flag load, which is only visible to the extant mod team, they're in pretty much the best position to make the call on how many hands are needed.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Feb 13, 2017 at 19:57
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    If those are present, those should factor into the decision of the load since it'd be affected by that. And a good thing to bring up during an election.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    Feb 13, 2017 at 20:07
  • @pnuts I think the usual idea here is that the right path for that information is [users] -> [mods] -> [community team]; so if you feel you're not getting your pings taken care of fast enough, let the mods know first, and only if you feel like they're not taking you seriously does it go up the chain. If you let your feelings known to the mods, they ought to take that into consideration. [And, the things you mentioned are mostly still visible in other stats, I suspect.]
    – Joe
    Feb 13, 2017 at 20:33

13 Answers 13

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Recently (a) single user(s) have been on a spree of intensive editing of old posts , often mostly tag edits, which has led to some annoyance with other users in chat & comments. What is your stance on this, do you intend to intervene and if so, how?

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Two users are fighting, leaving snipey comments on questions/answers, in chat, etc. How would you deal with this?

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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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You see a question / answer that you personally consider naive, stupid, lying, missing info, etc. How do you handle this as a moderator? How do you respond to the user?

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As an elected moderator, how much time will you be able to contribute to Travel SE tasks, at what time of the day and in which time zone? Will you have regular offline periods (we all love travelling) that you can foresee already?

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Every so often the Travel Chat Room devolves a bit into mini fights between users, or worse, a group hate of a user on the site who has no knowledge of the chat. How would you engage and prevent the chat from scaring off new people, causing problems and starting disagreements?

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Travel SE has had some competitions in the past (most recently the bounty bonanza, some answering competitions and a double-site hats competition with Expats). As an elected moderator, do you intend to initiate/support/incentivize more such competitions? (Maybe you even have some ideas to share?)

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What do you intend to change, improve and keep as it is about how moderation is currently run on Travel SE?

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I find that there is very little guidance as to how to use tags and what is a good structure for tags. Given that tagging and tag edits have become somewhat controversial recently:

  • What is your personal best practice in terms of tag usage?
  • Do you intend to (interacting with the community and the other mods) create a semi-official guideline for tagging (which tags to use and create, for Travel SE only of course) as a moderator?
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Do you have experience as a mod, whether on another SE site or elsewhere?

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What are your overall priorities in terms of improving the site? Are there specific areas you would focus on to improve the experience for new askers, new answerers, well-established users, unregistered browsers, etc...?

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Do you think there are regions of the world that need special attention ? i.e. that are not yet much covered.

If yes, what will you do to change this ?

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Do you have any special language skills that could make you a valuable moderator ?

i.e. you speak 5+ languages & can help bridge cultural gaps as well as get info where "mono-linguistic" people would struggle

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