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.

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Travel Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2021-08-16. 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 2021-08-16 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

What is your opinion on how strict close-voting should be in Travel.SE? As a mod, would you try to carve out a very strict definition of what "Travel" is or be open minded and allow as many travel-tangential questions as possible?

Answer 2

Could you give up to three examples of your posts on meta which illustrate your moderating style?

Answer 3

There have been a number of meta discussions about questions under the tags identify-this and where-on-earth and their suitability for the site. As there's no clear consensus, the fate of such questions (remaining open vs. being closed vs. being closed then reopened ad nauseam) often seems to be almost entirely down to chance. Would you be willing to define a clear policy towards such questions? If so, how would you go about defining the policy?

Answer 4

Unfortunately, at some point people will call you names, accuse you of colluding, being biased or other such insults. It just happens. How would you deal with this?

Answer 5

In which timezone are you located - or at least located most of the time? Our website receives traffic/flags from all corners of the world so its important to have timezone coverage.

Answer 6

What's your view on list questions? Here's a Travel Meta link and a Main Meta link for background. Do you think Travel.SE should be more or less accommodating to these kinds of questions?

Answer 7

What actions do you plan to take for users performing serial and/or targetted downvoting?

Answer 8

The Warren Buffett question (adapted to fit this election):

What policy, with respect to running and moderating Travel SE, are you in favor of, that (you think) most of our users are against?

The reasoning behind this question, as explained by Warren in the video:

Well, they'll tell me what I want to hear. I want to hear what they tell people who disagree with them on the subject. (...) I know you really believe in that, you know, and that's really the test.