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We recently printed some business cards for our Stack Exchange employees and they turned out great.

It got us thinking: our sites' moderators have been working hard to keep our sites high quality for the past few years. They may not be employees, per se, but great community moderators are why our communities are safe, sane, and worth visiting in the first place..

If you're a Stack Overflow moderator, would you be interested in having your own Stack Overflow contact card? Would you find it useful?

I can see them being handy to pass out during your local tech meetups or conferences.

Below is a mockup:

(click on image to see full res version)

Stack Overflow Moderator Card

Of course Twitter ID/phone# are optional. It can be Skype, AIM, etc.

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  • 1
    Can I +1 again? Also, will these be one of those "funded perks"?
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:03
  • 19
    Is this what you're supposed to put in those fishbowls at restaurants?
    – random
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:05
  • 1
    I think only The Usual Suspects should get them.
    – Rick Sladkey
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:07
  • 1
    Is it for all SE mods or just SO?
    – Michael Mrozek
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:19
  • @Michael I can only imagine all SE mods.
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:24
  • 4
    @Michael this post is for SO mods only. I'll be posting the same post on other sites' metas later.
    – Jin
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:26
  • @Jin you're just asking us to revert our upvotes aren't you? :p
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:37
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    @Jin: StackApps doesn't have a Meta :)
    – uɐɯsO uɐɥʇɐN
    Jun 10, 2011 at 0:13
  • 22
    Was I the only one expecting a PDF to print out my own set of moderator trading/collectable cards? You may have played spolsky, but I've got a mrozak and shog9, and I'm tapping Skeet's rep. Good luck against this combo!
    – Pollyanna
    Jun 10, 2011 at 0:50
  • 6
    @AdamDavis: I was actually hoping for playing cards, but these are good too.
    – mmyers
    Jun 10, 2011 at 1:41
  • @mmyers Ooh, that's good too! On SO there are 10 moderators, which would make up four kings, four jacks, and two jokers.
    – Pollyanna
    Jun 10, 2011 at 2:15
  • 1
    Free stuff? Count me in.
    – user1228
    Jun 10, 2011 at 13:13
  • 2
    @AdamDavis ~ Will we have the option to toss some polly in there with a "oh no you didn't, logical fallacy attack!"
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 10, 2011 at 15:08
  • What @Won't / Will said :) I think I'm going to going to try and start a local dev user group around my patch. Would be nice to hand out to the uninitiated.
    – Kev
    Jun 13, 2011 at 13:19
  • I'm still waiting on the rest of my so called swag, please include this in the rest of it, thank you.
    – casperOne
    Dec 20, 2011 at 16:46

5 Answers 5

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These would be particularly handy for those of us who speak at different type of user group meetings. I give semi frequent talks for local Debian / Ubuntu user groups, and sometimes talks on how to ensure compliance with OSI approved software licenses at offices (all for free).

This is something I keep completely separate from my day job, mostly because it's for my own enjoyment and I don't see why promoting them would help anything. I don't want to sell someone a VPS, I want to help them avoid conflicts with various versions of the GPL.

SO, on the other hand, is a great companion resource to almost everything that I discuss, or probably ever would discuss.

I'd be all for being stocked with professionally printed cards and a nice cache of stickers to give away. I gave away most of my SO stickers when I got them, people really liked having something cool to put on their laptop.

Did anyone who received a sticker or a million unicorn bucks become an active contributor? I really don't know, I don't think there's a way to even track it. The point is, it helped me do something I normally do a little bit better - while also promoting a resource I could feel good about promoting.

Addendum

I'm all for moderatorname@stackoverflow.com, however I don't want yet another POP/IMAP account to manage. This is for a couple of reasons:

  • My mail client is already beginning to choke on less powerful computers (netbook / mobile)
  • Sometimes I have to use the uber expensive 3G network to get mail
  • Just one more login to remember / set up again if I change mail clients or reload my OS

For these reasons, I'd prefer the e-mail address to be a simple incoming forwarder that I could manage via editing my preferences in my profile.

Edit

Mine arrived :)

Awesomeness

Sorry about the blur. The camera on my phone has no understanding of hyperfocal distance and doesn't offer a 'manual' mode.

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  • Wait... where did custom ...@stackoverflow email addresses come from? Where did you hear about that?
    – uɐɯsO uɐɥʇɐN
    Jun 10, 2011 at 0:15
  • @George I think because of this answer. It's been brought up on meta before but not gone well I think; the only post about it I can find at the moment is this one, which got marked status-completed because mods can send messages through the site now (which isn't really the same, but satisfied the goal of notifying users in an official way)
    – Michael Mrozek
    Jun 10, 2011 at 0:25
  • @George it came from me. Shoot me if anyone needs to be shot.
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 10, 2011 at 15:06
  • I concur, it should be a forwarding address. But it would carry a tad bit of fame-weight, yes?
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 10, 2011 at 15:07
  • I don't even want a forwarding address, just put my own email address on it.
    – casperOne
    Dec 20, 2011 at 16:44
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OK, moderators have officially been mailed the form to obtain the cards. Stay tuned!

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Would probably be really handy with a moderator@site email address {wink wink} Of course, most of us just haz the gmails anyways, so no big deal there.

I think that the inclusion of the twitter handle is a good idea. What about the inclusion of a linked-in url or something?

Also, since you're the resident designer @Jin, what about one or two QRs on the card? Would that be overly dumb? Just a thought.

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  • 1
    I was just going to point out that a QR code would be quite useful. +1.
    – George Marian
    Jun 9, 2011 at 22:08
  • 2
    +1 for moderator@siteemail would be awesome!!
    – studiohack
    Jun 9, 2011 at 23:14
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    does anyone actually use QR codes?
    – Sathyajith Bhat
    Jun 10, 2011 at 4:49
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    Having a moderator@site email would be nice, although I agree with @TimPost that it would be best if it just forwarded to our existing email, in the spirit of not having to remember yet another login. stackexchange@mywebsite.com is a lot less professional than myname@superuser.com, although both are better than someguy@gmail.com.
    – nhinkle
    Jun 10, 2011 at 5:28
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    @Sathya yes, I and several others use them, apparently. I know it's a lot handier than having someone type out a URL or what have you.
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 10, 2011 at 15:04
  • @nhinkle I love that suggestion. I suppose I should give @TimPost the props then eh? That makes a lot more sense to me, just to have the email as a forwarding spot. And it would be a perk of being a moderator, not something tied to moderation duties. We know enough to know to bring it back into the fold if we need to contact people for moderation needs.
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 10, 2011 at 15:05
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    Thanks for the support @jcolebrand. Perhaps to differentiate mods from SE employees, it could be moderatorname@mods.se, if that domain is available, or @mod.sitename.com
    – nhinkle
    Jun 10, 2011 at 16:26
  • @nhinkle I know someone purchased meta.so and made it a redirect domain, and they offered the domain name to the team, perhaps that's an opportunity to explore? altho I imagine mod@sitename.stackexchange.com is sufficient
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 10, 2011 at 16:32
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    The problem is, what about retired moderators?
    – badp
    Jun 13, 2011 at 8:00
  • @badp ~ What about 'em? This is a for-life position, so if you give it up then you willingly sacrifice those perks.
    – jcolebrand
    Jun 13, 2011 at 14:44
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    @jcole eh... I was thinking about something else entirely but just decided it doesn't really matter anyway
    – badp
    Jun 13, 2011 at 15:08
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I'd definitely be interested in having a few of those. I plan on going to the next SO meet-up in my area and I'm going to try to make it to the Washington D.C. DevDays conference later this year, and I'll probably need something to authenticate myself with.

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  • 10
    You think they wouldn't recognize you from your avatar?
    – balpha StaffMod
    Jun 13, 2011 at 8:27
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    I'd think you'd be pretty recognizable, unless reptilian developers are much more common in your neck of the woods than they are in mine.
    – mmyers
    Jun 13, 2011 at 16:15
  • Is there a story behind "the Lizard"
    – JoseK
    Sep 20, 2011 at 8:40
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    @JoseK: No, at least not a very good one. It's just the name of my blog, which I named after a character in one of my favorite books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I chose that character because my real name does happen to be Bill.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Sep 20, 2011 at 11:18
  • Oh excuse my ignorance - I did read the book in my younger years though.
    – JoseK
    Sep 20, 2011 at 12:22
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When I saw the cards I was directly thinking of more general purpose cards. A card with an interesting real question from SO, and the starting of three possible answers. So you can play a little game with the one receiving the card.

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