@Fredy31 A contentious policy/guideline implemented five years ago slowly accumulates votes that change to a significant majority-lead for the opposing, initially rejected, proposal. What is the best course of action?

And what is your role, as an elected moderator, regarding the discussion?

@TimmyJim How do you rank these qualities in terms of importance for a moderator?: 1. To serve the community as a janitor whose daily task is handling community flags. 2. To mediate between problem users. 3. To shape community decision-making by active meta-discussion.

@Akixkisu great points. I would say 3, 2, 1.

While moderators should handle community flags as a daily task, the community themselves are usually more than capable in addressing flags (via review queues).

Problem users are a more difficult issue for the community to work with, which is why as moderators I put this one second since moderators have more tools and generally more knowledge for handling these users.

Lastly (or firstly!) I think meta discussion is vital for determining community decisions and processes and its important that moderstors participate

Thanks for answering :)

@Akixkisu In my years in the community, I've always seen the rules and guidelines as being able to change with how the community sees them. If the feeling on that policy changes, and there is movement to repel the policy, well then, it will be changed. Except if the policy would literally break the site, like if a policy was that every answer had now to be a joke answer

So to wrap: there are 2 things that are necessary for a policy change: A community consensus on the thing, and, where the mods come in is making sure that the policy is not dangerous to the health of the site, but even then it should not be a 1 mod going against the grain, it would be probably a mod consensus that 'X policy must not be enacted, because it would screw with how the site works'

Thanks for answering as well :)

@dly A new and highly active user has gained the privilege that their edits to any question or answer are applied immediately. They enthusiastically edit about 50 questions within 2 hours, adding sources, fixing grammar, adding "real" headers for accessibility, etc.. How do you approach them?

@Akixkisu it depends on the type and age of the posts and the quality of the edits. As long as the posts are somewhat recent and the edits all good I would do nothing about it. They have earned the privilege and as long as the site doesn't stop them it's ok to keep doing it. A new privilege is always attractive and people want to use it right away. And they can of course.

Only when the edits raise a number of problems, such as rollbacks, edit wars, mass necro'ed question or the edits would have been rejected without that privilege I would reach out to them to slow down a bit to make sure their edits are of enough quality in the future. Other than that I see no problem in them fixing a large number of posts.

Thanks for answering as well :)

@Akixkisu I did that myself when I hit 2000 rep (albeit mostly focusing on retags of old questions), and was told to slow down by a moderator to avoid flooding the front page, which I have respected.