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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 here.


Physical Fitness Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2021-08-09. 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 2021-08-09 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.

  • 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.

  • We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

    • 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?
    • How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?
  • The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

    • In your opinion, what do moderators do?
    • 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?
    • In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
  • 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. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

    • We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
    • 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.

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  • Honestly looking forward to seeing who steps up. There are quite a few of the core users I'd vote for over myself.
    – Alec Mod
    Commented Aug 2, 2021 at 21:27
  • For reference, here is the question collection from the recent SFF site election. scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/13350/…
    – JohnP Mod
    Commented Aug 4, 2021 at 14:04

3 Answers 3

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Question for candidates

Here's a scenario that has happened to me on a few occasions.

You're a moderator now. You find yourself in one of those disagreements that turn into a bit of a heated argument with someone who is making logical arguments, but throwing mildly irritating namecalling in there that targets you.

The namecalling is vexing because - while your skin is thick enough - it detracts from a healthy debate, but you're unsure if it constitutes reprimands. If you reprimand, you might look like one of those power-hungry mods (and you'll hear that one too), but if you let it slide, they may get the feeling that it's ok to escalate namecalling in a later conversation with someone else.

"How do you proceed?" is a tough question because it can change. But how do you think you'll proceed?

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  • What about addressing the logical points while saying "no namecalling please, as it detracts from the conversation"? :-) Would that work?
    – user35666
    Commented Aug 8, 2021 at 5:53
  • @ParibusCeteris - You would think so, right? But it turns out it's hard to argue logically with someone who has thrown logic to the wind and started with the namecalling in the first place :D
    – Alec Mod
    Commented Aug 8, 2021 at 19:28
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What do you consider to be the absolute minimum amount of activity a moderator should contribute to their site as a normal user (e.g. questions/answers/comments/etc), above and beyond their duties as a moderator?

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As a moderator, your votes become binding. Actions you used to take like flagging, reviewing, closing, and deleting will take effect immediately without any input from any other users or moderators.

How will you adapt the way you currently flag and vote to deal with this change?

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