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One of our most recently elected Moderators, David Siegel, is no longer a Mod here, which leaves Laurel and me as the only active Mods, so we are thinking about holding an election to find someone to fill his shoes.

This question is to test for willingness of community members to step up and self-nominate before we decide to hold an election. If you're interested in running, please leave an answer below. Note that this is not an official election nomination thread, so it doesn't commit us to holding an election, and neither does answering here commit you to running in any election.

Some info about the job

Official requirements:

  • at least 18 years old
  • at least 300 reputation points
  • no suspensions on any site in the SE network in the previous 12 months

Nice-to-haves:

From CollenV's answer here:

Things to know about being a moderator on ELL:

  • You don't have to log in every day... or even every other day. The amount of time you have to spend moderating is very flexible. If you need to be away from the site for a longer period of time you can set yourself as inactive without needing to resign.
  • You don't have to be an expert in English. A moderator's job doesn't involve answering questions about English. You just need to be able to communicate in English well enough to communicate with ELL community members, and read well enough understand the various SE codes, policies and other documents attached to this site.
  • The types of flags you handle on ELL are usually pretty mundane. If there's any situation you don't feel comfortable moderating, you can always ask someone else on the mod team or from the company's "Community Manger" (CM) team for help.
  • You don't have to have a lot of reputation to be a moderator, but you should have some experience with the review queues and be familiar with Stack Exchange policies and content guidelines. As a moderator, you will be able to close or reopen a question with a single vote, delete comments and posts, lock or add notices to posts, etc. The rest of the mod team will help you, but you may not be able to convince users to vote for you if you seem like you know very little.

More details of the responsibilities of a Mod can be found at the FAQ on Meta Stack Exchange.

Note that we cannot hold an election until next year due to the upcoming holidays.

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  • 2
    "Laurel and I are thinking about holding an election". What about the other current diamond moderators: Em, Glorfindel, and J.R.?
    – Nike Dattani
    Commented Nov 24, 2023 at 15:53
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    There are five moderators. Aren't they enough to cover all the moderator's tasks in the main site? If they aren't enough, what are the tasks that require the additional moderator? (I am asking because that could be relevant to somebody who is offering to be moderator.)
    – avpaderno
    Commented Nov 24, 2023 at 16:48
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    @NikeDattani Em, Glorfindel, and J.R. are no longer active as Mods. I've modified the question to add this info
    – gotube Mod
    Commented Nov 25, 2023 at 3:32
  • @apaderno See my comment above to Nike Dattani
    – gotube Mod
    Commented Nov 25, 2023 at 3:33
  • @gotube why are they still diamond mods then? Why not have them removed? I guess for you to do that, you would need a majority of the diamond moderators to vote the other ones out, and right now the "active" diamond mods are the minority, and the "inactive" ones that ought to be removed, are the majority. I guess it would have been better to deal with this earlier, when it was only one or two diamond mods that were inactive. Now our best bet is probably to convince them to resign. I think having three diamond mods that are so inactive that you're saying it publicly, is a pretty big problem.
    – Nike Dattani
    Commented Nov 25, 2023 at 5:30
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    @NikeDattani I can't share any mod-only information, but yes, there are only two of us actively doing Mod stuff.
    – gotube Mod
    Commented Nov 25, 2023 at 6:26
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    @MichaelHarvey All Mod work is open to the scrutiny of the users in one way or another. Some of it is visibly tied to your account --like closing questions, or deleting anything-- while other things aren't --like dismissing flags and sending disciplinary messages. But even these things can (and will) be scrutinized because it's clear some mod did it. The amount of mod work done by an individual mod is only visible to SE staff and other ELL Mods.
    – gotube Mod
    Commented Nov 25, 2023 at 21:24
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    @NikeDattani As far as I'm aware, other Mods cannot vote to remove a Mod -- they can only retire or be removed by SE staff. Where did you get that info?
    – gotube Mod
    Commented Nov 25, 2023 at 21:52
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    Even if there's not a queue of unhandled flags, there's other reasons why a site might want there to be more than just two active ◆moderators. I'm active daily on a site that has about 7x fewer questions/day compared to ELL, and there's two ◆moderators that are active and reachable, yet still we often need more (especially during certain hours of the day). That's a site that has almost 0 conflict, and had exactly 0 suspensions from 2021-2022 compared to 84 suspensions on ELL. If gotube and Laurel feel that more ◆ help is needed, I support that and don't feel I need to question their reasoning.
    – Nike Dattani
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 17:45
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    It's important for mods to be transparent, so I'm not going to feel bad about asking for more information about what is motivating this election, and what the two out of five moderators believe is an appropriate amount of what sorts of activity for a mod. Mods are supposed to be exception handlers, not ELL super users.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 18:03
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    @ColleenV It was more of a "wow, gotube can't take a vacation without the flag queue growing" deal. While I'm also here (especially if there's urgent stuff), I would rather have another active mod. Regarding I have concerns if this election is because "we need more people with unilateral votes to keep the queues under control" I've thought long and hard about the close votes queue (yes, it's too big) and I think the solution is to change the close reason text so that fewer close votes are cast. We can also set up better new user onboarding. All of that will be easier with a new mod.
    – Laurel Mod
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 20:11
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    @NikeDattani You could suggest an additional public activity requirement for mods in a Meta SE post. This meta post isn't the time or place for that.
    – Laurel Mod
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 20:12
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    @Laurel Thanks. It's always better to have more capacity than just barely enough. wrt review queues I wonder if ELL just needs to get more people engaged. There are enough active users that have the privilege; I wonder why they don't participate in the queues. Solving that issue would be better than giving the few who do participate more influence or discouraging people from close voting IMO.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 20:19
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    @NikeDattani Because another tool that has been used to 'fix' queue issues is to reduce the number of votes required. I'm not arguing with Laurel's exact approach, I just don't think it's a problem mods can solve by focusing on the number of things in the queue.
    – ColleenV
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 20:29
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    @ColleenV When I say "Mod stuff", I mean handling flags, sending mod messages, and communicating with each other about other things. The review queue length didn't enter into that discussion, though we have discussed it – it's one of the "other things".
    – gotube Mod
    Commented Nov 27, 2023 at 23:00

2 Answers 2

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Without committing to running, I will say that I am interested.

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    My first choice would be to vote for @ColleenV if she would only stand again, but I think that ain't gonna happen, so you can probably count on my vote if it comes to it. But so far as this preliminary page is concerned, I'm just gonna upvote anyone who throws their hat in the ring here. If the particular two "active" mods we have right now think they'd like another pair of hands, I have complete faith in their judgement - and there need to be candidates if we're gonna have an election.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 30, 2023 at 17:02
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I am interested in being a moderator on ELL.

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