9

Travel Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election starting next week, June 11th. 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, June 11th 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.

  • 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.

17 Answers 17

Reset to default
10

Do you believe that travel.stackexchange "isn't very welcoming?" If so, how will you address that as a moderator?

6

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?

5

Which of your contributions to Travel Meta do you feel has been particularly valuable or is most representative of your potential style as a moderator?

4

In the past (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?

4

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?

4

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

4

Do you think funny comments should be deleted? or do you think that any unrelated comment should be deleted?

3

What is your expected availability in terms of number of hours contributed to the site per day?

3

Do you use the Travel Chat room? If not, why not? If so, how would you deal with negative attitudes or disagreements/fights between users new and old ?

3

How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

3

Our unanswered question count is slowly creeping up, nearing 500. What would you do to help with this?

2

What one thing do you feel you bring to the site that would prove the most valuable addition from yourself as a moderator? (not just answering questions)

2

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?)

1

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?
1

If you had a theme song to describe your moderation style, what would it be?

2
1

Under what circumstances do you believe comments should be deleted? When should they be moved to chat?

1
  • There are mod guidelines for this already. When they aren't helping clarify or add to, or have devolved into a discussion, away they go (abbreviated version). SE tries to be pretty strict on them.
    – Mark Mayo
    Jun 8, 2018 at 1:58
-2

An argument arises, two different opinions adopted by two different groups, fellow moderators in one side and some top members in the other side (whom you believe are adding real value to the site), there's no SE rule that might settle this up officially but your vote will. Will you:

  1. Take the side of fellow moderators, risk pissing off the top members.
  2. Take the side of top members, risk pissing off the other moderators.

and Why?.. remember that the two different opinions will not be against any SE rule.

Do not tell me that you will be "unbiased" and vote for what you think you like. The situation is more of a political one and is totally dependent on your vote and it's not about opinions or preference anymore. Think of it as a leadership test.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .