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I opened this question, and one of the excellent suggestions I got from Tim Post was to open a new request for this feature.

I can at least partially understand the reasoning behind not keeping the notification banner up, but I feel very strongly that we need to have an easy (one click) way to get to the moderator election page during ALL PHASES of the election.

Mod elections are super important since mods play a huge role in how the site operates, but right now we are basically sending a message that if you don't log in or click on the election link within 48 hours then we could care less about what you think.

Proposal:

Add a link to the election page in one of the menus. The picture below illustrates just some of the many options available. I'm sure the valued employees at the Stack Exchange Network can come up with much purtier ways to do this.

enter image description here

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  • 1
    I wouldn't put it where it would disrupt the layout; sticking it in the tabs area (it's not a tab) or the questions/tags/ect sections area would be bad in my opinion. Sticking it ob the top bar seems feasible though, like where the VOTE button is in the sketch.
    – Zelda
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 15:23
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    It would be neat to have something in the top bar, to the right of the thingamadongdong. Something like "Election open, nn slots available", "Have you voted in the primary?", "The election is ON!" with the same click to dismiss as the the "new blog" notification.
    – user50049
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 15:26
  • @BenBrocka - good points. I'm not making a suggestion on where to put it precisely, just showing there are a lot of options available.
    – JNK
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 15:30
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    @TimPost Perhaps a unicorn speeding by leaving behind the words DEMOCRACY! in rainbow letters
    – Zelda
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 16:19
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    @BenBrocka Contrary to popular belief, unicorns don't fart democratically.
    – user50049
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 16:36
  • +1 for those hideous freehand... um... whatever those are ;-)
    – The Unhandled Exception
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 17:32
  • @TheUnhandledException - "Shapes" I think covers it nicely.
    – JNK
    Commented Nov 10, 2011 at 17:45

2 Answers 2

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I agree with you 100% - community moderator elections are one of the most important opportunities for a site's community to take ownership of their site by choosing who will represent them when moderating and when communicating with the Stack Exchange administration.

It's too important to keep hidden. So we've made two changes that should make them easier to discover:

Community Bulletin Board Events

What an election event looks like in the Community Bulletin Board

Rolled out (at Rebecca's urging) just in time for elections on Skeptics, Mathematics, and Database Administrators, this notification area is available for the promotion of all manner of community events. Election announcements are added automatically, and remain in place for the duration of the election. This provides a link to the election from nearly every page on the site!

Newsletters

What the election announcement looks like in the newsletter

First suggested by N.N. a few months back, and implemented by Emmett just yesterday, this puts each phase of the election right at the top of your site's weekly newsletter, ensuring that even folks who don't visit the site regularly but keep up on what's going on via a subscription will be notified.

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I just wanted to point out the process I went through just now to find the link.

  1. Checked front page of stackoverflow.com, did a Ctrl-F on the page for "election" and "moderator" -- no matches.
  2. Clicked "FAQ" link in the header and searched for "election" and "moderator". The only occurrence of the word "moderator" on the page was here, in regards to question deletion.
  3. Clicked "About" link in the header and searched page for "election", found a link titled "democratic moderator elections" (bingo!) which led to a year-old blog post (damn!).
  4. Came to meta.stackoverflow.com, used the site search to search for "moderator election", and finally found this question from February that contained a link to the page I was looking for.

I understand not wanting to clutter up the UI, but this page is incredibly hard to discover now that the site banner is gone.

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