@SSumner Cheer up, contrary to what any possible previous moderator elections might make you believe, moderation is not really about asking and answering questions anyway. ;-)

@NapoleonWilson oh I'm well aware and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it if/when I lose

@Keen since you're obviously awake, I have a question about moderating.

@MikeEdenfield 'Awake'?! Look who's being generous.

What questions you got?

I'm using my recent tagging quest as an example but it's really a bigger picture question.

When I volunteered to spearhead a tag cleanup effort it got lots of good response from the community, but very little response from the mod team. Other than a few quick comments, all I really got was a tacit approval in the form of not telling me to stop.

was that because:

1. None of you were all that interested in it?

2. None of you had any time?

3. You thought it was something the community should tackle on its own without moderator intervention?

Basically, when @Richard asks me if I plan to keep up those efforts, is that something that's realistically likely to happen?

By 'little response' what expectations are you comparing it to?

i just mean there wasn't very much in the way of moderators actively participating in the metas, or the chat room, or whatnot.

I'm not complaining. I'm trying to gauge if being elected would impact any intention I have to keep at that effort.

Okay, so I can't really speak to the other moderators, especially since I don't recall them commenting on it.

if you're sitting there thinking "there's no way you're gonna have time for that silliness"

or if there was some kind of thought that "this isn't something we (you guys) need to involve ourselves in"

or if it was just "wow, good luck with that, glad someone else is doing it."

However, most of these big project overhauls to the site aren't actively undertaken by mods because of 1. the time/energy it takes, 2. personal interest, and 3. because mods shouldn't be the leaders on all site activity (in part because #1 makes that unrealistic).

well #3 is what I have been wondering about for a few days.

if, hypothetically speaking, I were elected, would it "look bad" for me to keep up the efforts that I started?

So if you get elected, you're free to continue doing those things. But understand that as a mod, you're going to be dealing with flag clearing, and participating in meta posts. Both will eat into your currently-free time and energy.

@MikeEdenfield No, that item is more conceptual than any sort of enforced rule. But imagine if there were mod-run posts on tag clean up, tag wiki creation/updating, comment clean up, and whatever other areas the site could use some additional attention on. At a certain point, the mods would be spearheading all this stuff on their own. It's way better for interested users to spearhead projects.

I'm sincerely trying to decide if becoming a mod wouldn't ultimately mean I would do less good for the site in other ways that I currently have some momentum going in.

@MikeEdenfield Well, moderating is doing a good for the site.

sure. but there are plenty of other mod candidates that I expect would do equally as good a job, but so far no one else seems to be taking any interest in this stuff.

which, of course, might mean that it's ultimately not that significant of an effort, and I'm just entertaining myself :)

There's another angle which is that maybe the community would be more invested in helping with the tag cleanup if there was a diamond next to your name. :3

That's true, though as you said I'd need to take extra care not to look like I was trying to railroad my own opinion into the site.

I like to think I already take care not to do that -- that I can separate "asking the questions" from "giving my personal opinion", but with a <> I would probably need to dial back on the latter a lot more.

I guess the best thing to do is just make that point clear and let everyone else decide...

@MikeEdenfield Well, that is what the voting on posts is for.