Are moderator positions granted for life?

Question

I was looking at a list of our amazing moderators, and came across Jesse Dorsey, who has been inactive for over 5 years. Is there any sort of criteria to retain your moderatorship?

Answer 1

list of our amazing moderators

Thanks for the compliment :)

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Are moderator positions granted for life?

As long as they're active and/or willing to moderate the site and/or don't do naughty things, yes, we can consider that they'll be moderators for life.

There are a couple of ways to view "activity":

• Posting questions and answers (doing this is not part of the responsibilities of a mod)
• Commenting, reviewing, editing posts, etc. (we have a user that only flags no longer needed comments)
• Performing mod-only activity: handling flags, suspending users (not that we do that often), etc.

Thus, a mod could be super silent and look inactive but spend their days deleting no-longer-needed "thanks" comments.

Is there any sort of criteria to retain your moderatorship?

That's up to the mod and to StackExchange CM staff. A mod can decide to step down. The decision could also come from the CMs, or from the mod and CMs.

As an example, Tetrad was a mod before, but he no longer has his hammer diamond.