Let's disallow moderator nominations from people who've been suspended in the past year

Question

Well, it's election season again. On sites all over the network, moderators are being selected from among the good folk willing to volunteer their time to help guide and support their communities. I'm proud to be part of a system that governs itself in this manner; for all of its inherent messiness, democracy goes an awful long way toward avoiding the sort of alienation and discontent that tends to settle on communities over time.

But about that messiness... For as long as we've been doing this, we've faced the question of whether or not to allow candidates who are currently or recently suspended. In the past, we've taken a hard stance on preventing or removing nominations from folks who are currently suspended on the site running the election. But the more elections I see, the more I've come to believe that allowing nominations from candidates who are currently or recently suspended anywhere on the network is a bad idea:

• They lead to speculation and personal attacks. It's natural and healthy to discuss the beliefs and behaviors of nominees, but suspension details are mostly not public; this makes frank discussions difficult. It is possible for the moderators involved in the suspensions to reveal the details, but this tends to be seen as unnecessarily personal and vindictive, even by those who would normally favor transparency.
• They leave insufficient opportunity to demonstrate good faith. Everyone makes mistakes; most of us try to move on from them. But moving on takes time; rebuilding a reputation tarnished by inexperience or one bad day requires long-term effort. In the meantime, even the most sincere candidate's record will be controversial.
• They distract everyone from the most important question in any election: who will make a good moderator? Let's face it: a checkered past is entertaining in a way that years of patient service to the community isn't. But turning elections into a circus hurts everyone who cares about the long-term health of the site.

Five years ago, Pekka made a reasonable suggestion:

Candidates who have a record of vote fraud within the last two or three years (or whatever time span is decided) be silently removed from the nomination page - the more boring, but probably wisest option.

I think we should do this. 2-3 years is a long time on The Internet, but 1 year (after the end of the suspension) strikes me as quite reasonable - and also happens to match the longest suspension period normally imposed. If you can manage to avoid trouble for that long, you should have a reasonable chance of being able to run on your merits.

Unless someone can raise a credible objection to this, I plan to start implementing this immediately: the next time someone nominates themselves after having been suspended on any Stack Exchange Q&A site during the past year, we'll quietly withdraw their nomination and send them a message to let them know why.

In cases where the suspension was clearly in error - lifted early with a message explaining the situation - we'll forego this process.

I spent this afternoon spot-checking various elections throughout Stack Exchange's history, and found very few cases where this would've mattered (see Appendix below for details). But invariably, these were some of the most controversial and distracting nominations in those elections.

Any thoughts or concerns?

Appendix: how would this have affected past elections?

A few people have expressed concerns that this would be either too widespread or too fuzzy. So here are some hard numbers:

• There've been 136 elections held under the current system
• There've been 1266 nominations
• ...from 984 users
• ...of whom 76 have been suspended at least once
• And finally, 54 nominations were posted within a year of a previous suspension by the nominee.

The last one - 54 nominations - is the number that would've been blocked if we were doing this all along. Except... It shouldn't really be 54, since at least two of them were posted after a candidate (already a moderator) got another moderator to suspend him "For Science". This same candidate went on to run in two elections and win one, making him one of only 3 candidates with recent suspensions to ever win a moderator election.

What can we take away from this data? Here's what I got out of it: folks with sketchy pasts getting elected isn't a problem - it almost never happens. Folks are pretty good about letting others know when someone is likely to cause problems.

...But that - the discussion of past suspensions - has been a problem: far too many of those 54 nominations have managed to significantly derail the elections they were part of, turning them into public trials of the nominees. The goal of a timed suspension is to let someone reconsider their actions and move on quietly, without having to leave the site or spend the rest of their days under a dark cloud; having everything dragged out into public defeats that goal, hurts the person nominating as well as the larger group who must try to sift through the drama to determine what is and isn't relevant.

Answer 1

I am very happy with this. I don't think it's an unreasonable restriction and the net win for the process itself is big. This is supposed to be a fun and exciting time for a site and everyone that participates in the process.

I have a couple of thoughts.

While it's not an unreasonable restriction, we have to ensure that people anticipate it. I don't want a scenario where someone spends a large block of time putting forth a good-faith nomination only to realize that they weren't eligible because of that argument they kept poking 11.5 months ago and have since forgotten about. We need to make it clear where they enter their nomination that we have this restriction, and encourage anyone in doubt to contact us to talk about it.

Secondly, suspensions are sometimes issued in error, or in excess of what the situation called for upon review. It doesn't happen often, but mistakes do happen. This could theoretically lead to someone thinking:

I know this user was suspended on Mayonnaise SE within the last year, something something about Miracle Whip.

If the nomination is allowed to continue, folks are going to just have to trust that we (the Community Growth team) reviewed everything there is to review and determined that the user shouldn't have been suspended. In other words, I don't want to create even more incentive for the details of the suspension to be aired out like laundry - that's a big part of what we're trying to avoid.

What I like the most about this plan is that we're not creating any additional process around an already kind of complicated thing. It's just more review.

Answer 2

I agree with this. Being a moderator is a higher responsibility than being an ordinary user; it should follow that moderators are held to a higher standard, and that there is an intermediate stage where someone is trusted enough to be a user, but not to be a moderator.

But I'd like to propose a tweak (I think I got the idea from Chris in chat): rather than make the ban on nominating for moderator last one year, it should last as long as the suspension. At least in this ballpark, perhaps not exactly with a 1:1 ratio.

This reflects the fact that different suspension lengths reflect different levels of problematic behavior. I don't think that someone who was banned for one day to halt an edit war should be banned from running in an election six months later. At the other extreme, someone in a one-year suspension didn't get that way by accident (one-year suspensions are normally handed out for a third instance of problematic behavior, clearly a habit and not a bad day).

This also means that there is no need for an election suspension review process that's separate from the participation suspension review process. If a suspension is considered unwarranted and overturned after three days, it won't have lasting impact. If the suspension is maintained, the election suspension stays.

Answer 3

To somewhat play devil’s advocate, I am throwing an alternative into the ring that has not been discussed yet (forgive me if I missed something):

TL;DR

Let the voters decide, but steer inform them appropriately.

Suggestion

Do not block anybody from nominating (with the possible exception of currently suspendend users) but show the suspensions big and noticeable on the candidate’s nomination, i.e., like this:

Hello, my name is Palpatine and I want to be your emperor moderator …

[candidate’s text]

Palpatine was suspended on 19.05.1999 on Galactic Politics SE for vote fraud (suspension was lifted due to being accidental).

Palpatine was suspended from 16.05.2002 to 23.05.2002 (one week) on Galactic Politics SE for warmongering.

Palpatine was suspended from 02.09.2002 to 02.10.2002 (one month) on Galactic Politics SE for warmongering.

Palpatine was suspended from 15.05.2003 to 15.05.2005 (two years) on Galactic Politics SE for warmongering.

However, be somewhat less lenient with what suspensions are shown, e.g., show every suspension within the last year, but show all year-long suspensions from the last three years.

Why could this solve the problem at hand?

We know that most voters do not look any further than the election page. For example 27 k users voted in the last SO eletion, but the Questionnaire for that election was visited by only 6 k people until today¹. Most voters do not want to spend much time on voting but want a short digest of most import information on the candidates, which guides their decision.

As far as I can tell a considerable amount of the drama around the recent SciFi Election was about making the candidates’ suspension history known and the fact that the community actually elected one of these candidates. I think it is safe to say that if the suspensions were displayed, the former source of drama would have been obsolete and the latter source of drama would never have occurred since the candidate would not have been elected.

Yes, all of this is influencing the voters, but so does displaying candidate scores and reputation on the election page. SE is neither important enough to have independent journalism to pre-digest information about candidates nor is it relevant enough to motivate voters to consume that pre-digested information. The best we can have is a digest which is as informative and neutral as possible. And displaying recent suspensions fits very much into this.

^{¹ which includes a lot of repeating visitors and visitors who did not vote. Note that I chose SO here to keep the relative impact of that number as low as possible.}

Further Pros

• This is more democratic.

• It softens the threshold. You still have to choose when to show a suspension, but at the end of the day, the voters decide.

• This alleviates possible fuzz around borderline cases, weighting suspension lengths and reasons, unjust suspensions and so on. It’s the candidate’s job to explain their suspension.

• Moderators do not have to worry that much about ruining a user’s election chances when issuing a short suspension.

Cons

• With some candidates, it causes more quarrel than if those candidates weren’t allowed to run in the first place. However, in some cases, it causes less quarrel. It’s hard to foretell.

• Such a candidate may still be elected and do bad stuff, but that would require expertise demagogy or true dedication.

• This poses the problem of candidates not being honest about their suspension in their nomination. Outright lies should arguably lead to a disqualification, but what about the grey area?

Answer 4

I tend to agree with this. The reason is, unlike content that you contribute to different Stack Exchange sites, the principles of moderation stay the same between them, for the most part.

These people should be exemplars of good behaviour within the community, and that includes other SE sites - it most definitely is relevant. When their reputation is tarnished by a suspension - especially, but not only, when the circumstances around the suspension are controversial - it shifts the focus from electing moderators to stopping candidates from being elected.

It turns what is generally, and what, in my opinion, should be a positive campaign of people promoting their merits and recognising their shortcomings into target for negative campaigning, where people dredge up the past. It's certainly not healthy for the candidate either, I don't think.

On the other hand, there is the supposed view that the end of this timed suspension period, your reputation will be recalculated, and your account will resume as normal. We don't hold grudges. I'd probably say that this means to apply only to being able to participate as a user on the site, and that's fair - moderators are held to a higher standard, and rightfully so.

Additionally, preventing someone from running in elections for an entire year even if their suspension was for a single day might be harsh. However, that really does come down to moderators exercising good judgement when issuing suspensions, even single-day suspensions. Suspensions should never be taken lightly anyway, and as far as I know, aren't, so this shouldn't be a real problem.

On balance, I think this would have positive effects, as it would avoid the kinds of issues you mentioned, but also give everyone a chance to forget about the person's past behaviours, focus on their (more) recent contributions, and, for the candidates involved, not have those past incidents brought up despite their attempts to improve and move on from them.

Answer 5

I agree with this in general. I'd say if you've been so immoderate as to get yourself banned from an SE site, you need time to let bygones be bygones before you can be an undivisive candidate.

There are however certain suspension reasons, and/or times, that I think would be valid exceptions to that:

Why was BalusC temporarily suspended from SO?

Congratulations Eric Lippert for finally winning the 'c#-language' badge (I guess that no suspension was actually handed out here, but it was strongly suggested)

Both of these involved users in otherwise very good standing being suspended essentially for "What the heck is going on? Stop for a second so we can talk".

Opinions may vary on this, but I don't even see a "one bad day" level of reputation tarnish there. But if you're going to have a rule about disallowing someone from this level of interaction with their site, I think the rule must be applied consistently. BalusC shouldn't be prevented from nominating, but not because he's a cool guy who contributes a lot of good stuff: because the suspension reason was preventative, not punitive.

In other words, I think the stakes are high enough here that this rule should not be subject to -- or even be able to be cast as -- favoritism-like decisions about who can and can't be a mod.

I'd suggest that only long-term suspensions count for this disqualification: more than a week, say. Another option would be only suspensions that were not lifted manually. A third would be to add an explicit "slow down" suspension reason, distinct from "cool down", that is excepted from this rule.

Answer 6

Except for voting fraud suspensions (which are supported by objective, system level facts about the user) I am not interested in suspensions candidate had on some other site.

There are over 500 moderators at over 150 sites across the network, sometimes with totally different culture. I did not vote for these guys, I do not participate in sites they moderate and I have no reason to trust their judgement if they decided that particular user needs to cool down at their site.

I don't want these 500 guys to stand in my way of evaluating candidate. I prefer to do it myself based on candidate's activity on my site (except for if they were involved in voting fraud elsewhere).

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For now, you can enjoy your little scientific stats and supportive voting from your buddies at Teachers Lounge. But wait until someone publicly complains about block from elections.

If (when) this happens, you better hope that their suspension wasn't even remotely questionable and that you will be able to communicate that publicly. Because to the world outside of TL this will look like unfair manipulation.

Answer 7

It sounds like a nice idea in one sense. It is a bit analogous to that of a man being locked up for 5 years for robbing a bank. Upon being released from jail he can return to the normal community, but would hardly expect to get a job as a bank teller. Such jobs have higher degrees of trust and probity attached to them.

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But, could the system be "gamed"? A lot of computer systems are gamed these days by people working out how the rules can be turned to their advantage.

Here's a hypothetical scenario:

• A user John Doe has been doing a good job on his site, he has gained reasonable amounts of rep, and done his job editing posts, voting to close, and so on.
• He lets it be known that he is interested (or is an obvious candidate) in the next moderator elections
• Another user has a grudge against John Doe. This user didn't like his posts being voted to close, or his edits refused, or something.
• This other user provokes John Doe into doing something silly. With enough goading John eventually lashes out with an insult or something similar.
• The other user makes a strongly worded complaint to the moderators about John Doe. "This isn't the way to run a site, I'm deeply offended, blah blah".
• John Doe is suspended for a week.
• The other user has achieved his objective. Now John Doe can't be considered for the upcoming moderator elections, because of this extra year's period.

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I'm not sure of a good compromise but maybe this proposed rule would kick in for long suspensions (for something really bad) but not short suspensions.

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(edited to add)

Possibly influence moderators to not suspend

Another issue would be the effect this might have on moderators. Presently if you suspend someone for a week, that is the entire punishment. But now you would have to take into account possibly forthcoming moderator elections. You might think "is what he did bad enough to not allow him to nominate for an entire year?".

So you might not suspend, but merely warn.

Therefore a side-effect of this proposal might be that less people are suspended than previously. Is that a good thing?

Answer 8

This is partially in response to Nick Gammon's answer.

Rather than hard coding it as a year since the last suspension of any length, make it that the time passed is greater than the length of the last suspension.

Thus if they've only been suspended for a week, then they're only blocked for a week after the suspension ends. This means that the blocking period doesn't seem to be excessive for minor infractions. However, as Catija points out a week (or a day) might not be long enough to determine whether the person has reformed or not. So perhaps the time should be the next suspension level or a year (which ever is the greater).

So for a suspension of a day they can't nominate for a week, for a week a month, and for a month or longer they can't nominate for a year.

Answer 9

To split out a sidenote from Gilles' answer, I'd suggest specifically that if the suspension was ended early, the default should be to allow nomination with no further ban period. That would handle the majority of cases identified so far where the suspension shouldn't weigh on the candidate's eligibility: preventative suspensions (e.g. BalusC) and suspensions that proved incorrect.

These cases are, as I understand it, rare; most suspensions are served out. But when they do happen, it seems like they almost never correlate with any sort of behavior that should really cast a shadow on future elections in any way. So it should be safe to remove early-ended suspensions from consideration.

Answer 10

Full disclosure

As of the time I posted this answer, I had just exited from a one-day suspension on Super User.

While this idea was on my mind for some time, I have to put it out there that I may be under a conflict of interest, so please take this answer with a grain of salt.

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I think the underlying idea has very good merit. However, one year for any suspension of any length anywhere in the network within the last year does seem a bit harsh to me. A minor issue can cause brief suspensions lasting a week or less, and often with just a short-term effect on the community's goodwill toward the user.

I'd suggest that users be disqualified for 10× the sum of the length of all suspensions ending within the last year, with a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of 365 days. This means:

• A user suspended for three days or less will be prevented from running for moderator for 30 days.
• A user suspended for a week will be prevented from running for moderator for 70 days (about 2-1/3 months).
• A user suspended for a month will be prevented from running for moderator for ten months.

This should address the concerns posed by Nick Gammon's answer and avoid being too harsh on good-faith users while still reducing the chance that a dispute would arise during an election due to a prior suspension for a more serious issue.

In any case, incumbent moderators should be able to exercise discretion in applying this rule.

Answer 11

Given

• Moderators are chosen by the users to do the will of the users.
• Some suspensions are due to the Stack Overflow company not liking users who care more about what is what's best for the original aims of the site then the company's imposed political correction agenda.

Should actions of the company remove the free choice of users to choose their representatives?

Answer 12

What real problem is this actually solving?

A user suspended on one site is unrelated to their activity on another. If they happen to be a negative contributor on the site, they are very unlikely to be elected. So if they were suspended recently on a different site, why should they be barred from running? Just because some baseless accusations might fly in this political environment (e.g. "I was suspended because the mods are scared of me winning elections")? This is the nature of heated political environments and must just be suffered.

These don't sound like real problems.

Further, community managers can take down moderators and presumably nominees at will. Preventing the rare self-destroying community from it's own destruction is part of their job. And as far as I know this deus ex machina has never been employed on nominees or recently elected moderators.

This is not equitable

If formerly suspended users are not allowed to run, they are still paying for their mistakes when their suspension should have covered it. They messed up and paid with a suspension. The suspension has now passed. The violation against the community has been paid back. But worse, they would be barred for a violation against a different community entirely, not even the one they are hoping to represent.

Much in the same way ex-convicts have trouble getting jobs. It's not equitable and it's not right. The difference is we have the power to be equitable on Stack Exchange.

I would rather hear baseless arguments about a suspension than valid arguments that SE moderator election are inequitable.

What about the good guys?

Your post here says that you want elections to be about the merit of the candidates, and if they would be good moderators. Barring people from running for past reasons neglects the reality that they may very well make good moderators now. It assumes that once suspended users are not capable of moderating, which is frankly not true. And again, you take this a step further, declaring that apparent past inability to positively contribute on one site means they clearly cannot contribute positively on a completely different site. What bollocks.

We should trust the communities to make good voting choices

This proposal shows no faith in the communities that elect their moderators. The users that bother to vote generally have a good idea of who would be a good moderator and who would not. And for those that don't, the pre-election phases allow for plenty of time for the trusted users to make it known that they believe the bad ones are indeed bad.

In the tour of every SE site it reads:

[SE site] is run by you!

A hollow claim to those barred from moderator nomination.

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This proposal is not congruent with the philosophy found in these two posts:

• A Theory of Moderation
• Who are the site moderators, and what is their role here?

Answer 13

I disagree.

Sometimes people challenge the status quo and pick up a suspension in the process.

And sometimes, especially on the smaller and younger Stackexchange sites, suspensions can be politically motivated; often stemming from either a personality conflict or a difference of opinion.

Preventing recently suspended users from running for moderator would be a bad idea.

Answer 14

I think we need more context on this. Politicians usually propose a change in the law touted as designed 'for the Greater Good' (TM) but in effect promoting their own /special interests. I hope this is not the case here.

The election at SFF seems to be the background of this discussion, and people on Meta SE don't know even 1 per cent of the stuff that has been happening there, and cannot come to a meaningful conclusion based on this question alone.

Thus, I have two things to say:

• first and foremost, I don't want past transgressions on a site or current bans on other sites to disqualify anybody from running in the election. If a person does not abide by the rules of the network, issue a permaban and be done with it, moderator or not a moderator.

• second, the question has to be revised to reflect the story at SFF, and to include the viewpoints of all the sides. Otherwise, it will be regarded as hopelessly biased.

_{I also agree with Nick Gammon's view that this opens up the field for power games and election manipulation.}

EDIT: At Tim's request, I'd like to make my position clearer.

• Bans for infractions on other sites should not disqualify a SE user from running in an election. We have to avoid the impression of power games by other peer mods. no change needed
• Community managers already have the authority to terminate an elected moderator. If they deem a moderator unsuitable for the position, they can de-frock him/her practically at will. no change needed
• If an infraction on another site is deemed serious enough to prevent joyful inauguration as a mod, it is also serious enough to ban the user from Stack Exchange. Thus, the network-wide ban should be imposed by Community Managers which automatically means the user won't take part in the elections. no change needed except in SOP

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EDIT #2: I see quite a few similarities between the proposal under discussion and this one (YouTube):