2014 SO Moderator Election Q&A - Question Collection [closed]

Question

In connection with the Stack Overflow moderator elections, 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.

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

Here's how it'll work:

• During the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, February 17th at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 3:00 pm EST 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. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.

• This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into at current.

• At the end of the 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. That said, if I have concerns about any questions in this fashion, I will be sure to point this out in comments before the decision making time.

• Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, containing 10 questions in 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 new process, feel free to post as a comment here.

Answer 1

How would you handle the balance between moderator enforcements and community self-moderation? What would you do in case of community disagreement with the moderator's actions and vice versa - how would you handle situations when the community is consistently doing something against the guidelines? In your opinion, should the rules be imposed on the community or community should form the rules? All in all, what is the right balance for it?

Answer 2

You are not elected as a moderator. How will this influence your participation on Stack Overflow?

Answer 3

What is your philosophy regarding when a moderator should take action, versus allowing the community to moderate itself? And how would you handle a situation when you personally think a question should be reopened after the community has closed it?

Answer 4

I see a lot of duplicate answers pop up. Some at the same time, but some are a long time after the first answer.

What are your views on answers, that are just copies of answers provided 10's of minutes before?

Answer 5

As a moderator, What is your take on People behaving somewhat rude on the newbies asking for help ?

I see a lot of new users don't post about their effort, existing code. People (including me sometimes) ask "What have you tried ?". It may appear rude to OP. It is in the rule book of SE that you should do your homework first before asking question on stackoverflow or other stack exchange sites but new users may not be aware about that.

Answer 6

Here's a situation:

A person sees a comment (from another person) that offers a (sort of) correct answer for the question. He doesn't understand it well, yet he posts it as answer in the hopes of gaining a lot of +10's.

Now, that answer is partially right (it's been copied!). What would you do to that answer? Removing it means leaving the question answerless. Keeping it would mean a low quality answer and unfair to the one who posted the right comment. I've seen such situations, even though I haven't been on SE for long.

Answer 7

You finally made it and got elected as a moderator! But just barely, with a couple of votes over the needed limit, and there are many people that are against you being a moderator. There are even comments like "If that guy gets a diamond, I will leave SO forever".

How will this influence your actions as a moderator?

In particular, what are you going to do (if anything) to try to prevent "That guy deleted my question just because I didn't want him to be a moderator. Now see how right I was with that!" reactions; how do you deal with such reactions?

Answer 8

Have you ever been banned (temporaryily) from SO?

Some naughty behavior on SO can lead to a temporary ban for a user. For instance, failing too many review audits may cause a user to be banned frrom reviewing for a short time.
Also fiddling with the voting system, like serial up/down voting can put a user on a temporary suspension.

Have you ever been banned? if so, why?

Answer 9

A user asks a question that seems relatively off-topic with the Stack Overflow questioning context(not a mainly coding question), but is a question that concerns many members and receives many upvotes and even more, many good answers (measured by upvotes too). As a new moderator, What do you do and how do you react?

Answer 10

You start handling a flag which you tend to agree with (e.g. NAA, low quality etc) and right before you click the delete button (or even worse) you notice the offender is a friend of yours in real life.

What are you going to do? Delete action is public and he/she will see what you did and might be upset... in the real life. What takes precedence?

Answer 11

How would you deal with a user that gets upset on your comments to his question (poking to improve) and flags your comments for moderator attention ?

Answer 12

How much percentage of time which you currently devote for Q & A will be reserved for moderation.

If you are selected, Will you be contributing in Q & A with same efficiency as you are doing currently?

Answer 13

A longtime user (20k+ rep trusted) and a relatively new user (say 1k rep) get into a disagreement over an answer. The veteran clearly feels that the new user's answer is wrong (think of the difference as pot-ay-to vs po-tah-to). The thread ends with the new user's answer being accepted, even though the veteran's answer was also correct.

Later the new user complains about mysterious downvotes and notes the veteran seems to be shadowing them in threads. There's nothing overtly wrong being done here but, as a moderator you look into it and see that there seems to be a distinct pattern of downvotes going on, even on answers that don't seem to warrant it.

How do you handle it?

Answer 14

You Found a Funny Question by a new user , Just in hope to get upvoted and get some reputation , as a moderator what will be your first Action?

Answer 15

I have seen many legitimate first posts flagged for various reasons, and there can be a fine line between setting the filter too tight for legitimate new users vs too lax for spam or troll users.

What actions do you think best separate out these two groups, and what should moderators do better in order to encourage new, unfamiliar users while discouraging trolls and spam?

Answer 16

There are a lot of sites with similar subject matter to Stack Overflow, perhaps with overlapping user bases and questions - Computer Science, Software Quality Assurance & Testing, Programming Puzzles & Code Golf, Code Review, Database Administrators, Information Security, Programmers, Game Development, and more. Cross-posting and poor migrations are a problem, especially for the communities still in Beta. What do you plan on doing to help educate users who cross-post? What about users who suggest that questions be cross-posted, especially without understanding the expectations about the other communities? And finally, as a moderator, understanding these other communities yourself so that you can migrate (or not migrate) effectively?

Answer 17

Sometimes there will be edits which have the below case.

A reviewer thinks it should be rejected and clicks reject. But to his surprise he will get a message saying this edit already approved.

How would you handle such cases. because useless edits take place and will be approved.

Answer 18

(Based on some questions on meta and my opinion too)

There is an issue with voting system in SO. The supposed problem is that voting isn't working well in answers/questions that:

• Already have many upvotes/downvotes. That means: if user is visiting question with 20+ voted answer - good chances are that he'll upvote that answer just because it already has high rate. Same goes with downvote
• Were posted "too late". There are many questions, answers to which may be done with short explanation and 1-2 links to manual pages (but still that answers may be good) - but, in the same time, answer may involve explanation of CS theory, some deep research e.t.c. - i.e. definitely better than short answers, but takes much longer time to be written. Obviously, good chances are - "fast answer" will get more upvotes, just because it's fast

Since you'll be a moderator, I want to ask - do you think that this supposed problem is actually a problem? How do you feel about this and what may be your suggestions?

Not to be included in question to moderator

It's obvious, that points above may not be treated as problem. And they are not related to moderation directly. But since moderators are supposed to be "leaders of the community" - I want to know their feelings about issues above. So it's my point to ask them about that - because it's very important for me (even in this thread we can see samples of "fastest answers in the West" or "upvoted just because" - in my opinion)

Answer 19

How will you handle a flagged or closed question that is about a topic way out of your knowledge. For example, if the question is kind of technical and regarding to some weird esotheric programming language (like Brainfuck), and you don't know anything about it. What will you do?

Answer 20

Whatever country you are from, you will be expected to moderate a site with global reach. While all operations might be conducted in English, its user base includes people with different cultural norms and values from your own. How do you expect to deal with different kinds of reactions to moderator actions and how will you determine the best way to communicate this site's values to those whose background is different than your own? What equips you for this task?

Answer 21

In order to give voters more insight into candidates' moderating styles, what specific set of additions/changes should be made to the metrics on each candidate?

In particular: During an election we see all sorts of claims being thrown around by and against candidates about people's historical actions. To the majority of us users who don't devote a large part of their life to the daily drama on SO, this is a useless and aggravating insider debate with unverifiable claims. Certainly it provides no insight. So what (aggregated) metrics should be added/changed in order to gives users a quick and objective picture of a candidate's behavior? e.g.

• aggregated % of time you vote-to-close, vote-to-keep-open, etc.
• aggregated % of time you uphold flags (broken out by category)
• what % of a mod's votes-to-close were overturned/rejected?
• your recommendations here?

Note: any such metrics would be aggregated (and thresholded) to preserve individual anonymity.

Answer 22

How do you balance your time between Stack Overflow and your other commitments? How will becoming a community moderator change that balance and do you have any changes coming in the foreseeable future (for example new job, baby on the way, etc) that will change that?

Answer 23

What action(s) would you take if it was brought to your attention or you saw that a particular user was trolling every answer on a question leaving what most would consider to be rude, non-constructive comments, where they just wanted to point out that everyone was wrong to be antagonistic in drawing out arguments for argument's sake?

Answer 24

What would you do if someone flagged your question or posted a partly offensive (you think it is offensive, but generally it isn't) comment about you?

Answer 25

If you make a mistake, everybody can, or misunderstand something and take an action. Will you act like nothing happened and cover it or will you try to fix it somehow?

Answer 26

How would you deal with new users who follow posting habits mandated by other sites but which are unacceptable here? For example, many fora like official PrimeFaces forum require user to post complete classes and JSF pages, because their users like to be able to copy the whole code into IDE and launch; whereas SO likes the code to be as minimalistic as possible.

So we have a user that posts the whole assignment (from uni, workplace etc., it doesn't matter here), post the whole code they have written, in effect his post is a big wall of code taking multiple browser pages to read. At the end or in comments he specifies what he really doesn't understand/what is the problem here, so it's not a help vampire, but someone who doesn't know how to post.

The question: how do you deal with it?

As a moderator you could simply delete the question to prevent heart attack/browser collapse by other users. You could immediately close the question, providing comment what is wrong here, or expecting user to find out himself why question was closed, if he cares enough. You could also edit the question yourself or write a comment you will reopen the question when the edit would make that question more readable. Or you could do something else.

Answer 27

In your eyes, what are the tasks of a Moderator? Which, if any, tasks do you see as more important than others? And, given access to the moderation tools, which parts/tasks do you plan on accomplishing? How do you plan on accomplishing these tasks? Be specific.

Answer 28

What would be the first thing you would do if a user, who has just recently gained the tag edit privilege, had been mass removing a tag from questions, and most of time without any justification?

• Would you review all the edits one by one?
• Find a way to remove him this privilege?
• Contact someone from SO to help you rollback all of his edits with a script?

Answer 29

In your opinion what is the single most important function of Moderators?

Answer 30

• Which of the least-moderated but still popular tags would you bring experience to?

I tried to create a query using this start point: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/148022/moderator-downvotes-this-month , but got stuck on splitting the tags in a post. Could someone help if this is a popular question?