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Cryptography is scheduled for an election next week, December 3rd. 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.

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

As we did at the start of this year, we're hosting the question collection a week in advance, so that not only can folks start prepping questions in advance, but also potential candidates can think about nominating themselves and seeing the questions they'll have an opening to answer.

Here's how it'll work:

  • Until the nomination phase, (so, until Monday, December 3rd at 20:00:00Z UTC, or 3:00 pm EST 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.

  • We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The first two will be guaranteed to be included, the latter ones are if the community doesn't supply enough questions. This will be done in a single post, unlike the prior instruction.

  • Feel free to take questions from last time's if you believe it will be useful to ask again.

  • 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 at currently.

  • 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.

  • Once questions have been selected, a new question will be opened to host the actual questionnaire for the candidates, typically containing 10 questions in total.

  • 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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  • $\begingroup$ Here are the last two collections threads: one / two. If a question is still good / applicable, it can and should be re-used! $\endgroup$
    – SEJPM Mod
    Commented Nov 27, 2018 at 9:38

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What do you think Crypto.SE's biggest challenge is? (E.g. question/answer quality/quantity, too many/few closures, too many/few questions of a certain type, bad tools/guidance, …) What do you think should be done about this (not necessarily as a moderator, it's ok if this requires the whole community or Stack Exchange staff)?

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You check the review queues and stumble upon a question that's about cryptography, but the way the asker formulated it renders it borderline on-topic. There are already three downvotes and two close votes.

What do you do?

  1. You simply skip the question. — explain why
  2. You drop your moderator vote to close the question. — explain why
  3. You do something else — explain what you'd do instead

Pick one of the 3 options and tell us more so we can get a bit of an insight on how you think/tick.

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You've just deleted / closed a question alone (with your super-vote).
The author is accusing you of abuse of your moderator powers, via meta or chat.
How do you react?

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  • $\begingroup$ Source: 2014 SO election $\endgroup$
    – SEJPM Mod
    Commented Nov 28, 2018 at 13:45
  • $\begingroup$ Sure had this one a couple od times myself. It'll be interesting to read the answers to this one if it makes it. $\endgroup$
    – e-sushi Mod
    Commented Nov 30, 2018 at 21:17
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Give us an elevator pitch in a single sentence.

Why do you want to become a mod?

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You migrated a question with answer(s) because it was off topic here, but on topic on another site. A second after you've pushed the button, you notice the whole thing has been migrated to that site's meta instead of the site itself. Outch…

Now, you can not revert that derailed migration with some magic moderator button and the users at that other site are already posting comments at their meta, wondering why you migrated the question to their meta in the first place.

How do you react? How are you going to handle this situation to resolve the issue as quickly as possible?

Source: This actually happened to me today. In case of doubt, this can me answered — and was resolved — without any special moderator knowledge. Answers can/should show how future mods understand/value their postion as a moderator, and how they handle events where they stumble into pitfalls they digged themselves.

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Votes of moderators are definitive. If a moderators votes to close a question he doesn't need to ask anyone and none has to agree before the question is closed.

With this in mind, will you change your voting activity (= vote more / less / equally often) if you'd be elected?

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Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?

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How would you help make the site more educational?

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    $\begingroup$ I don't think I understand the question. $\endgroup$
    – Maeher
    Commented Nov 29, 2018 at 13:27
  • $\begingroup$ @Maeher Reworded. $\endgroup$
    – DannyNiu
    Commented Nov 30, 2018 at 1:09
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Here is a set of general questions, gathered as very common questions asked every election. As mentioned in the instructions, the first two questions are guaranteed to show up in the Q&A, while the others are if there aren't enough questions (or, if you like one enough, you may split it off as a separate answer for review within the community's 8).

  • 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?
  • 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?
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How do you feel about some people's claim that there is an inalienable right to not be offended?

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