@Rich That's impressive… reminds me of codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/11880/92951

I do agree the best mods come from the community and are consistently engaged in their community. What I'm more referring to is there's a lot of behind the scenes tasks even on a smaller site that can take away from normal participation on top some of the other things I mentioned to consider. Mods while helping build and take care of the community deal with a lot of clean up that normal users don't have to deal with.

I do really like this community, just was never quite immersed in it. This election is showing this site may need more care takes both at the normal user level going through queues and the mod level.

I'd much prefer someone more experienced on the site become an elected mod, but I offered my help just in case. If someone does come along, I'd still like to help the community by voting for high quality questions and answers and going though the queues to help take care of the site.

@Rich That's fantastic :D

Or heck, vim in GOL in vim lol

I think the problem with the "helicopter view" of moderation is that you don't have any "feel" for what people are up to. A lot of problems tend to be from people who are often not exactly crossing the line, but are very near it a lot of the time. Each comment isolated isn't so bad, but taken all together it creates an abrasive, or even outright hostile "feel" to a community.

The only serious problem we had on this site was with a user like that, and isolated the incidents/comments didn't look so bad: but all together ... yeah... it wasn't great. We finally suspended them (too late, probably) and he went in to a hissy fit and left, and the site has been better since. It took him a lot longer (years) to get suspended on Stack Overflow for worse behaviour, probably because mods there don't have the same "feel" and context that you do if you're more on top of things

In that sense, "helping" by deleting comments and such is probably not necessarily all that useful, as it deprives the more active mods from the context slowly dripping in

The entire thing is a bit of an academic point anyway, as I'm just not interested as I don't want to have the burden of responsibility where I feel like I have to check the site and feel guilty if I don't, and I know that is what will happen

That being said, it sure can be useful to talk to people a bit further removed from the matter at hand; I used the TL for that a few times. If people really want my advice then they know how to contact me, but I don't think that's needed because 1) it's not that hard of a site to moderate, and 2) the current moderators are at least as competent, if not more so, than I ever was

@Dom ^

I hope that makes sense. I only slept one hour tonight >_<

@D.BenKnoble yeah, it's interesting how that diamond encourages you to be the best person you can be

Maybe we should just give everyone a diamond

All problems solved!

@D.BenKnoble Wow! That is several orders of magnitude more complicated (and rigorous) than my fun evening project.

Bet theirs doesn't run in an 80x24 terminal though :)

@Dom one additional thing Martin reminded me of: at some point (I hope) this sight is going to hit it’s « growing pains », and we may well need some experienced mods to help direct our establishment of rules/faqs/etc. I keep tabs on several other mature SE sites, and there is a certain feel there that is hard to describe. Otoh, I want to figure that stuff out without losing what Martin describes as our impressively welcoming/kind tone.

@D.BenKnoble Yeah each site is different there, but the overall process that looks the same. I don't doubt this site will have it's own set of issues to wants to address when growing. The welcoming nature won't go away as long as we're clear about the site and have people to help new users.

I will say what's very nice about this site is the core scope is explained by the name of the site itself. The site is for questions about Vi/Vim. Because of that, some of the scope growing pains I think will be minimal. There still may be some problem areas found with time, but they should be easier to deal with. Other SEs I'm in like Music or Music Fans it's much harder so the scope and FAQ had to be shaped a lot and still there remains a bit of disagreement about some aspects of the scope.