6
$\begingroup$

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

Puzzling Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2025-08-12. 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 2025-08-12 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.

$\endgroup$

6 Answers 6

Reset to default
5
$\begingroup$

Why do you want to be a moderator on PSE? What do you appreciate about the site, and what would you change if you were able to?

$\endgroup$
5
$\begingroup$

How have you been involved in moderation issues in the past? Have you helped edit posts, been active in review queues, or provided help on meta, for example? How do you see your current moderation activity changing if you step into a more official and powerful role?

$\endgroup$
4
$\begingroup$

We have a very well used site-specific closure reason for puzzles lacking proper attribution. This is the most common site rule for new users to trip over. Often it is 100% obvious that a question posted in good faith lacks proper attribution.

How will you treat these questions? If you encounter the question soon after posting, with few or zero votes to close, would you use your moderator super-vote to hammer the question closed? Or would you leave it open and simply comment to ask for attribution? Or something else?

$\endgroup$
4
$\begingroup$

What are your most active tags as a poster currently - or in other words, what kind of puzzles do you specialise in creating or solving? Are there some types of puzzles that you wouldn't feel competent to deal with, if moderation issues arose that required subject matter expertise?

$\endgroup$
3
$\begingroup$

What is your communication style online? Even though tone/emotions are not always conveyed accurately through text, do you make sure to convey politeness to the other user as accurately as possible?

$\endgroup$
1
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ I like this question, but I would change the last sentence to say, "...through text, how do you make sure..." $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 12 at 15:22
1
$\begingroup$

Since the previous moderator election happened, the introduction of generative AI has greatly changed the landscape of creating and solving puzzles, and while the arguments at the time stated it wasn't much of an issue as the models of the time couldn't solve most of the site's puzzles or generate solvable puzzles, newer models have changed that.

What's your position on generative AI content? If a user makes a post that is confirmed (via the moderator-private strong or weak indicators) to be generated by AI, would you support deleting it on sight? Any difference on handling AI-generated puzzles vs. solutions? What if an AI-generated puzzle has gotten one or more good non-AI attempts to solve it?

$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.