2025 Moderator Election Q&A – Question Collection

Question

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

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Code Golf Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2025年08月19日. 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 2025年08月19日 at 16:00:00Z UTC, or 12:00 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 enough reputation to access moderator tools or become a trusted user?

• 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.

• caird coinheringaahing: Here is the question collection from the 2022 election if anyone would like to look through those for inspiration. 2020, 2018 and 2016, as well

Answer 1

In late May 2023, Stack Exchange Inc. released a policy to moderators effectively prohibiting the deletion of LLM-generated content across the network, starting a chain of events which resulted in many of the network's moderators and users going on strike a few days later. While the LLM content policy was the main focus, much of the strike was rooted in a growing disconnection between community and company. After much negotiation, the strike concluded on August 7th that year, with SE. Inc agreeing to restore and maintain the previously-disabled data dumps, empower moderators to hold the company accountable, and commit to working with the community in future.

Since then, SE. Inc has laid off experienced CMs and developers, promoted and integrated AI products against the community's will, restricted and recently poisoned the data dumps in an attempt to limit their usage for LLM training, and attempted to increase new user engagement by all means necessary.

With the above in mind, in the event that the company's decisions, present or future, conflict with what you believe to be best for the community, how would you reconcile such a situation?

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^{Inspired and modified from caird's answer from the last election, who themselves took it from xnor's answer from the one before. While the events that catalysed that have run their course, the environment that resulted in them is still very much present. Thanks to Mithical for helping me draft this.}

Answer 2

A not insignificant portion of the site's active users participate in chat, especially The Nineteenth Byte. While we do have elected Room Owners for TNB, moderators have greater powers in chat than any other user, and are often looked to when resolving moderation disputes, or are required to unfreeze rooms or to allow unregistered users to chat (e.g. in the APL Orchard ).

How active are you in chat, and how would you describe your approach to moderating a more informal setting than the site?

• caird coinheringaahing: Mostly copied from my answer in the 2022 election

Answer 3

As a site with a decade of history, community consensus on policy and community culture in general is likely to have evolved significantly from when rules were "set in stone", so to say. This was recently evidenced by the discussion around underhanded, which overturned the previous consensus banning challenges of the type.

As a new moderator who might not have been around back then, it's possible you disagree with the decades-old consensus. How would you handle a situation where a new post is ostensibly a very good addition to the site, but is unequivocally forbidden by consensus?

What about the reverse, where posts in a certain category consistently are of poor quality, but there is no consensus banning them?

• DLosc: More like a decade and a half at this point! :o

Answer 4

What is your favorite part of code golf?

The best referees are passionate about the sport as well. So I'd like to know what draws you to code golfing and this site.

Answer 5

The majority of the moderator responsibility on this site is dealing with invalid answers (verifying the issue, informing the user, and eventually deleting the answer).

How do you think you would go about this process in a way that is time and effort effective while still remaining friendly and helpful?

Answer 6

What previous moderation experiences do you have, both on-site (within StackExchange) and off-site (outside of StackExchange)?

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^{To address the concerns of this question looking like a conflict of interest, I'd like to clarify why I think this is an important and legitimate question.}

^{While it may seem like I would be the primary beneficiary of this question, I believe it accomplishes quite the opposite. Yes, my answer to this question would most likely look more "impressive" than other nominations, but consider this: there's already ample opportunity for me to scatter such information throughout my nomination text and my questionnaire answers. In fact, given the conflict of interest concerns stem from me using this as a chance to highlight my own achievements, some of the other questions here provide a much better opportunity for me to do so.}

^{In this regard, I believe it would be more of a conflict of interest to not include such a question. Allowing candidates to highlight their moderation experiences outside of StackExchange gives them a chance to prove to voters that they do in fact have moderation experience, especially if said experience isn't relevant to any other questionnaire question. And while nominees could put such experiences into their nomination text, that has a 1200 character limit which may not be enough to fully list all experiences.}

^{As to why I decided to ask this question at all, I believe it is extremely relevant to know what opportunities people have had to perform tasks analogous to what is required of a moderator, and to know that nominees have some knowledge of what they're signing up to do. Yes, having diamond moderation experience on another SE site is a stronger indicator than others, but it is far from the only indicator. Someone could plausibly have extremely comparable and impressive moderation experience from another community, and that would be more than satisfactory to prove they are familiar with what would be expected of them.}

^{Ultimately, I ask this question not out of self-serving promotional interests, but out of legitimate concern about what I believe to be a key aspect of potential nominees. There's guaranteed to be at least one not-me moderator (2 positions after all), so I would very much like to know this about a potential co-mod or elected moderator.}

• emanresu A: I think this question is a conflict of interest, considering that you're pretty much the only potential candidate who's been elected as a moderator on other SE sites. People will naturally talk about other relevant experience, moderation-related or not, in their nominations - I don't think forcing them to speak on this makes for a good question.
• lyxal: @emanresuA "People will naturally talk about other relevant experience, moderation-related or not, in their nominations" that's exactly the point. To give people a chance to tell us what knowledge of other moderation positions they've had. I fully understand that most potential candidates won't have extensive SE type moderation, so I'd like to know if they've had any experience. And with regard to fairness, I'll already be mentioning moderation experience in other places in my nomination (e.g. the "about me" section and some of the other questions here).
• lyxal: + on site moderation experiences also encompasses for example Charcoal/SmokeDetector interactions, revew queues, Room Ownership of important rooms, etc.
• caird coinheringaahing: For what it's worth, I don't believe that lyxal posting this is a conflict of interest. I think it's a valuable question that, frankly, I wish I'd posted myself because it also implicitly opens up discussion around moderation styles, which are incredibly important. I'd also argue that just because someone has moderation experience does not mean their nomination will be improved by talking about it; no-one wants to vote for the person who's entire campaign is "look at this one thing I did, vote for me". Also, we do not know that lyxal will actually run