CodesInChaos
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)?
One issue I'm worried about is the decreasing percentage of answered questions.
- Some of them are simply bad questions where nobody is motivated to answer. Not much we can do about those, since I don't want to be too close happy.
- Some are good questions which are difficult to answer, for which we need to find the proper experts.
- There are quite a few questions which should be answerable if somebody bothered to do it. We could improve this a bit with concerted community effort, but ultimately it'd be nice to have more users who regularly answer questions. The top 20 users posted half of all answers.
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?
In borderline cases I'd delay my votes until there are several community votes.
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?
Talk to them, either via comments on the question or via chat. I prefer talking before reopening it, but if they're current unreachable and I strongly disagree I might take action before that.
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?
On meta I'd post an answer, explaining my reasons for the decision. In chat it's trickier, since this can easily devolve into a pointless argument, so if it goes on for longer in chat, I'd take it to meta. If they convince me that my decision was wrong, I'd apologize and correct it.
Moderators have more to do, because they can do more. Will you change your activity pattern (= be more / less / equally active) on Crypto SE if you would be elected?
Unlike stackoverflow the activity on crypto.se is low enough so that moderator duties shouldn't take away too much time from answering. I'm already checking the site pretty frequently, so I won't need to change much in that regard.
Everything you say or said will be seen as "definitive" / "official" reference in crypto. Do you think you're wise enough for this kind of responsibility? How do you feel about this perception?
When speaking for the community, e.g. concerning policies or what's on topic, the comments need to be worded carefully to avoid offending somebody or giving the impression that the community is rude or unwelcoming.
When speaking about cryptography itself, there isn't much I can do about that misconception. I may not know everything about cryptography, but I only answer questions where I'm quite confident in the correctness of the answer. But since there is already a similar misconception about high reputation users, it shouldn't change much.
We already had questions on crypto where the author modified the question heavily (30+ edits), extended it and asked to answer the updated question, which was based on the answers given to a previous version. How would you handle such a situation?
Revert to a version which doesn't invalidate the existing answers and leave a comment explaining that this isn't how stackexchange works, so they should rather create a new question for their followup problems. If the user persists in editing, lock the question temporarily.
In your opinion, what do moderators do?
- Take care of obvious actions quickly, like closing blatantly off-topic questions.
- Act as a guide, explaining how this site works to new users. This doesn't strictly require moderator privileges, but still often falls to moderators when they close a question or when no other user left an explanation.
- Handle flags
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
One advantage is speed in obvious cases since the vote is binding. There are also a bunch of important tools, such as migration, being able to convert answers into comments or being able to view a poster's history even if it has been deleted only available to moderators.