So do we nominate someone or does it need to be self-nominated? I ask because I onlybsaw a link for "nominate yourself"

And what about our existing moderators? Do we need to re-vote them or do they automatically stay?

@halirutan They stay. It's just an election for one new moderator.

@JasonB. "All nominations are by definition self-nominations. Nominating others is absolutely not supported." source

How much time per week does an effective moderator typically devote?

@bbgodfrey They're pretty flexible with that. Happily, there is not much to flag, so modding here takes up only around five, ten minutes or so, which gives more time for me to answer questions.

(Put another way: thanks to having an invested community here, the modding isn't as difficult as it is on other sites *cough*.)

@halirutan Mod positions are for as long as the mod wishes to be one.

I have a short list of people I want to see running, but I'm not revealing it anytime soon. *whistles*

@bbgodfrey ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I hardly ever think of my time here as "X minutes set aside for moderation". As JM said, there's not much to do and we have an invested community that uses their own 10k, 20k privileges actively and wisely, so we generally sit back and leave it to the community to resolve issues and only step in occasionally.

I just visit the site regularly as I normally do (despite my decreased participation in answering for the past two years or so) and if I see anything amiss, I take care of it. For the most part, the 10k tools are sufficient, but when some spammer posts a dick pic on the home page, it's good to be able to nuke it out of orbit ;)

Yes, we got a dick pic once. Not nice at all... It certainly is satisfying to be able to delete those people's accounts and content. >:)

@J.M. At least he could have had the decency to post it in form of a question.

Already worked with a butt when I remember correctly.

@J.M. what exactly do you need help with? source

@Kuba Well, since we get busy at various points (you may all have noticed that I tend to take hiatuses of varying length), having another helping hand would be nice.

Maybe another way to put it: if it takes $n$ mods to tend to a site, get $n+1$ or $n+2$ of them.

@J.M. I see, thanks.

Is there already a list of moderators somewhere online? As a voter I would also be interested in seeing who already acts as moderator and so I dont vote for / nominate somebody already having that position but for somebody new. You could post such a list in the announcement page mathematica.stackexchange.com/election/2

@MauricioLobos Certainly, there's a list.

A tip: any user with a diamond after the user name on the main site is a mod. In chat, mods are distinguished by having their user names in blue (like mine, for instance).

It has been 22 hours and no one has nominated himself. What happens if no one does?

@bobbym I'm hoping it's because people are taking the time to think whether they'd do well modding this site to put themselves up for candidacy.

(Pessimistic version: nobody else wants our job. :P)