Hello. Sam Brand here. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m part of the CHAOS at Stack Exchange. I handle certain “special projects” across the network, oversee syndication, and occasionally poke my head into our communities to make sure our platform works to deliver killer content to the outside world. A couple weeks ago, I embarked upon one of these experiments.

Each day of the week (May 7 – May 11) I dropped into Google Trends: Hot Searches to find a buzzy keyword about which I could ask a question at one of our sites. I did this mostly out of curiosity; I’d never used the vast majo …

Hard to believe it’s been only six months since the last moderator election on Stack Overflow…

Remember A Theory of Moderation? It talks about how moderators are the “human exception handlers” on Stack Overflow, elected to deal with those rare situations the normal community moderation can’t handle. It also notes:

The most common moderator task is to follow up on flagged posts. Every post contains a small flag link, which anyone with 15 reputation can use.

Over 200K users with at least 15 reputation have accessed Stack Overflow in the past three months. That’s a lot of folks able to raise a red flag – and a lot of them do. …