2023 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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Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2023-10-17. 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 2023-10-17 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 enough reputation to access moderator tools or become a trusted user?

• 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

There is a new user that posts a few answers with the same link that may or may not be their own site or blog. Sometimes it seems like an appropriate resource, on other questions it not very relevant. One of the user's posts has been flagged as spam due to this. How do you approach handling this flag and the new user in general?

Answer 2

Hypothetical (?) situation: an especially active user, alongside a collection of great contributions to the site, also consistently posts low-quality answers, asks low-quality questions, and occasionally offers snide and/or rude remarks in the comments. This user is one of the highest-reputation and longest-active users on the site. How do you work with this individual in a way that retains their positive contributions, limits their negative contributions, and is beneficial both to the user and to the community as a whole?

Answer 3

Situation: A user that recently acquired the create tags privilege (300+ rep), creates a new tag for a question of theirs. They then suggest several edits that add this tag to various other existing questions on the same topic. These suggested edits all get approved in the review queue. But, all of this has happened without any discussion on the meta site.

As a moderator, what actions (if any) would you take?