Bicycles' second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:
He'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank him for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice as he learns the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out...
"Do you think bicycles has too many unanswered questions?"
Not really. Quite a few of the unanswered questions are practically unanswerable, especially the "identify this bike" ones. I'm actually inclined to delete some of the older ones as no longer relevant, especially when the user who asked hasn't been back for some time.
"What's your take on link-only answers that get flagged for not being answers?"
I much prefer to delete them. They're an attractive nuisance and if left tempt other users to do the same thing. Links break in many ways, not least by 404'ing, and the target can be changed at any time.
In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
Being a moderator happens now, reaching a high rep will take a long time. The high-scoring users seem to get 2k-3k points/quarter, so 30k is going to take a sustained effort for at least two years. Moderating is a different task, focused more on what other people are doing on the site rather than chasing votes. Vote-hunting means writing popular answers and steering away from anything contentious, even when the contentious answer is the useful one.
They exist to accept my suggested edits. More broadly, they try to drag the tone and habits of the forum towards civility and support. Also, correct spelig and grammer, evn whn just lazy ppl cant be bothrd typing.
"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?"
I'm inclined to delete most of those comments and paste them into chat, replacing them with a "this is contentious, take it to chat". IME it's often that there's disagreement about either the question or the answer, and the solution is either editing the question or for the disagreeing folk to write better answers. I've seen a number of those, and invariably the summary is "I think a different answer would be better but I'm too lazy to wr…
"a) What is, in your opinion as a potential future moderator, the biggest problem that bicycles.SE currently faces? b) If you were to get elected, what actions would you take towards resolving these issues?"
Lack of users and especially voters. It's rare to get even 10 votes for a good question/good answer. I've had answers that take an hour or more of research still sitting on 4 or 5 votes plus the accept flag a week later. By comparison, a similar answer on the Sustainability beta got 10 votes in a couple of days, so it's not just a number of users issue, it's people not voting. While r…
"How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?" A lot depends on the circumstances, if I thought they were in a bad mood or the question pushed their buttons I'd be more inclined to try contacting them offline. But unless it was an egregiously awful call I'd be inclined to take it to chat or ask a meta question.
Welcome all! This room is intended as a place to converse with candidates, discuss moderator traits, etc. For general discussion related to Bicycles Stack Exchange, go here: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/214/the-velodrome
If you have questions about the election process itself, please ask your question on the Bicycles Stack Exchange Meta Site. Remember, folks stepping up to lead this community are committing a significant amount of their time, please keep all discourse civil and constructive.
Bicycles' second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied, and the new moderator is:
He'll be joining the existing crew shortly — please thank him for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice as he learns the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out...