@selene made you a Room owner (RO). You get some more perms with it not sure exactly what thought.

sweet thanks!

Should we have certain criteria for people to become a RO? So active members can become RO. So x amount of rep or what?

It seems like the room owner stuff is only important if we were to make the chat room private chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/138810/… is that your understanding?

yes but also give access to users. For example if the room is being spammed a user with 1k+ rep can make it so only people with Explicit write access or RO can talk. So ROs can add active members so they can still discuss even when its on read only

Ah ok, yeah I think reasonably active users should be able to be ROs. Maybe as people chime in if we have seen them around meta they can be added as RO

I should of looks on MSE first

@selene I agree. Once we have a standard we can send a message and pin it

Me too...I'm still learning to search there :)

Usually, as long as there are some moderators around, you won't need a lot of Room Owners.

In your case, a couple won't hurt.

All users can flag a message for moderator attention though, which gets send to all moderators on SE who are on chat at that moment. So if something really gets out of hand, there are lots of people from all over the network available to help out.

oh all mods on SE and not site specific. I wonder why

Because such flags are often time-sensitive and there may not be local mods available, among other reasons :-)

Makes sense

@selene I'm thinking of something like this for RO. 750+ rep, at least 3 answers on the main site, decent meta activity, and interest in the election and organizing efforts for it. But in a week or 2 we also add being active here in the room as a requirement.

I've been RO of my local chat for years before I became a moderator. I do not have any affinity with Bioacoustics, but if there are any questions about the workings of chat you can ask me anytime.

@Mast Thanks. We will ping you if we have any more questions

@Ethan that sounds very reasonable to me!

@Mast thank you that is very much appreciated!

And once a new date for the election is chosen should we make that an even in the room? @selene

what do you mean by "even in the room?"

ROs can make "Events" in the room (Like reminders I think). chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/138810/…

Ah, event! Yes that sounds perfect. I hope this room is where we can discuss what that new date could be

room topic changed to Mod election: To discuss about the mod election.This includes possible nominies (dont peer pressue people into nominations themselves), a new date for the election, and other stuff to do with the election. (no tags)

I made the description clearer to what this room is for

@selene took a look and people who "register" or sign up for the event will be notified before it starts. I found an "FAQ" on it over on MSE meta.stackexchange.com/q/295936/1117855

Should we invite the rest of the people that nominated themselves for the election to this room so they can discuss it? Thought some of them may not be about to nominate again since they were suspened

oh wait I dont see the invite button any more

I added this as an answer on the meta post for the deferred election so hopefully that will bring people over

I saw but as of now, I am the only upvote. Hopefully a CM adds it to the question

So sounds like our main goals with the deferral are to (1) let some of the suspended folks go through the appeal process (though it sounds like people are not optimistic this will work) and (2) to try and identify other mod candidates within the community

That sounds right. We also need to figure out a new date for the election

Regarding finding other mod candidates - the "Community leaders and moderators" section of this post bioacoustics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/173/… made me feel a lot better about the effects of having some of our original mod candidates suspended

I had originally thought that moderators would have a much more significant role in shaping what we want our community to be, but sounds like the ideal situation is that they do very little, and we mostly just keep doing what we're doing

@TaikiSakai thats right. All mods do for the most part are deal with spam, R/A posts and users that should be suspended

But on many smaller sites they spend time in the normal review queues to help make sure that things get processed fast

Agreed @TaikiSakai to me it seems like my desire to be involved in a leadership role as a moderator before will still be possible to an extent I am happy with because I have pretty high reputation.

Having a lot of rep is important when running.

But since this is its first election this is not as important but a large number of helpful flags, close votes and reviews

@selene One difficulty some people have in transitioning from non-mod to mod is that for close votes especially there is pressure against using your vote, because it becomes binding (see for example meta.stackexchange.com/questions/41062/… - a very old but denied feature request). It's best to have non-moderators voting to close questions so that users see consensus behind these decisions rather than fiat

(in other words, it is very very important, especially on a new/small site, that many non-mod users use these curating tools)

That makes a lot of sense. I guess this also extends to delete votes, all kinds of flags and review queues that take more than 1 review to finish the task

@Ethan Yeah; delete votes are fairly rare. For spam and rude/abusive flags, 6 normal flaggers takes care of it without any moderator interaction: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/58032/…

@BryanKrause that's a great point and something that I would likely struggle with!

I'd be afraid to have "too much" power

@BryanKrause I honestly dont know how rare delete votes are since I only have ~800 rep on my #1 site. And with red flags I do know 6 will insta delete the post but if you are not sure you can flag it and let a mod decide but a mod can not flag for another mod to check

Other flags do very important things by themselves, like placing posts into review queue so that others can see that it needs attention. Even people without the ability to close vote can still flag posts and they get into the queue

@Ethan Most content that is actually Deleted is cleaned up by the "roomba" meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/auto-delete which is an automated process that removes closed posts with 0 or negative score, or it's outright spam or similar and is deleted immediately

@Ethan Not so much, at least since 2015 when the "candidate score" was invented. The only absolute requirement for mod candidates is to have at least 300 rep, and there's no strict minimum on number of flags, votes, and reviews. It's technically possible to become a moderator with 301 rep and no activity except Q&A. Outside of strict requirements, though: yes, it helps a lot to have experience with moderation-type tools such as flagging, voting, and reviewing.

(I'm not saying the user delete vote privilege doesn't come up, just it's far more rare than other actions like Close)

@Randal'Thor I was saying not running itself but running and trying to be elected. Users probably look at the amount of rep you have as well as that other stuff on your profile

During an election, each candidate will have a "candidate score" /40 displayed next to their name, which is based partly on rep (1 for each 1k, up to max 20) and partly on certain relevant badges. You can calculate anyone's candidate score using this query with their user ID (it accepts multiple comma-separated entries, so you can also compare and tabulate).

Generally, but not always, votes tend to correlate with candidate score. Don't worry if candidate scores here are very low: it's a new site, and the same scoring system is used on all network sites up to and including the ginormous Stack Overflow.

(Btw, if you wonder who I am and why I'm poking my nose in here: I don't know your site's topic and don't have an account here, but I've followed your situation on meta as a concerned outsider. Since you don't seem to have many SE mods within your active community, I'm happy to share mod-related info in here if desired, as a 6-year-tenured mod on other SE sites. Also happy to butt out if that's preferred :-) )

Thanks. It's going to be useful having a mod or 2 here to help people thinking about nominating themselves but aren't sure what being a mod is and how it will change their activity on the site so they can make a decision to nominate or not.

@HenryWHHackv3.0 Note the Privilege cutoffs for non-mod users are a bit different for this small site than in Jeff's post

@BryanKrause Yes some of the stuff in that post is out of date but the page is still linked in moderator election pages. So I was assuming it was relevant.

@HenryWHHackv3.0 Definitely very relevant :)

I would say it's relevant. Just some of the rep amounts are wrong for beta sites

In some ways, it can be better to have the highest-rep users not being mods: they're the ones with enough rep to vote to close/delete/etc., and they can then use those powers freely without the binding mod single-vote actions.

On the other hand, mods should be respected enough in the community to be able to take on a leadership role. Hypothetically, for example, if some high-rep users start to quarrel with each other over a site scope issue, a mod should be able to say "cool it" and they should listen.

I have to make myself clear by saying the part that says, "That’s why we appoint Pro Tempore Moderators", is out of date. In the past it was using a meta post (Which the post is referring to.), but now it's an election based system.

Oh yea. Luckly all the FAQs on MSE are up to date