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The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it on the election page.


Game Development is scheduled for an election next week, 12 April. 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 12 April 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. They are included at the bottom of this question.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Once questions have been selected, the candidates will be able to answer them as part of their nomination post on the election page as described in the announcement on Meta Stack Exchange. The full questionnaire is usually around 10 questions 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.


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).

  1. 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?
  2. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

  1. In your opinion, what do moderators do?
  2. 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?
  3. 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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    \$\begingroup\$ Should there be a link somewhere here or on the election page to the fine prints, i.e. that a moderator must accept the Moderator Agreement, and be 18 years or older to be a moderator? Maybe folks would like to know this before thinking about becoming a moderator? \$\endgroup\$
    – Vaillancourt Mod
    Commented Apr 6, 2021 at 17:39

2 Answers 2

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This is the "inverse" of question 2 proposed in the Question text: How would you handle a situation where another mod did not close/delete/etc a question that you feel should have been, and they answered it too?

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    \$\begingroup\$ I feel like I owe some apologies here.... 😅 \$\endgroup\$
    – DMGregory Mod
    Commented Apr 6, 2021 at 17:31
  • \$\begingroup\$ Oh, it's not really you :) When I was not yet a mod, I've seen mods answer some questions that I thought were off-topic. And I probably answer some of those questions myself :P \$\endgroup\$
    – Vaillancourt Mod
    Commented Apr 6, 2021 at 17:33
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Some too-young-to-use-the-site users come and ask questions here. Some very new developers come and ask questions here. Those too-young users are not allowed to use the site and should be reported (with their account deleted by the CMs), and very new developers ask off-topic questions that need to be closed. They're often desperate and need help. How do you feel about having those folks' dreams blocked because of the actions you need to take?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Perhaps this is a good question to ask of how they would like to triage questions in the future, maybe a more aggressive "are you sure you haven't seen this post before" interface? Mods helping devs, and devs helping mods. \$\endgroup\$
    – A13X
    Commented Apr 27, 2021 at 1:33
  • \$\begingroup\$ @A13X I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Do you refer to the folks asking very entry level questions? \$\endgroup\$
    – Vaillancourt Mod
    Commented Apr 27, 2021 at 13:07
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Vaillancourt Yes, sorry I may have misread that but that's what I would maybe do for entry-level questions. I agree that "too-young" users probably need to hold off on creating an account altogether. \$\endgroup\$
    – A13X
    Commented Apr 28, 2021 at 3:55
  • \$\begingroup\$ I'm not sure if there is a good way to implement this. New devs often don't know how to search well or what to search, or they don't understand the solution presented to them is the solution to their issue. \$\endgroup\$
    – Vaillancourt Mod
    Commented Apr 28, 2021 at 12:07

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