Welcome all! This room is intended as a place to converse with candidates, discuss moderator traits, etc. For general discussion related to Cryptography, go here: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/784/the-side-channel

If you have questions about the election process itself, please ask your question on the Cryptography Meta Site. Remember, folks stepping up to lead this community are committing a significant amount of their time, please keep all discourse civil and constructive.

Let me be the first to post a message then. How are the current moderators doing? Crypto.SE is a well moderated and largely self-cleaning community, and personally I'm rather happy the way it is. So if the current mods are happy as well I don't think there is any reason to change the current status quo. Maybe the mods themselves can chime in? Are there mods that want change?

@MaartenBodewes volume-wise I remember them saying it's not a challenge

Hu, I seem to have 97K in total, didn't even notice that :)

which is why we don't already have 4 mods

now this election is because we're getting a new mod to replace another one stepping down

and each site must have at least 3 mods

evenin' @mikeazo

@MaartenBodewes The election is my fault. I decided that I was ready to step down. I've been at it 5 years now, so I figured I'd let someone else have a go.

Wow, it's 5 years already. Sheesh. Great that you did this for so long!

The mod load is definitely not bad.

... as long we have e-sushi in there I suppose it isn't :P

@MaartenBodewes are you testing the waters for your own candidacy? :P

Not really, I should be trying to back down a bit from it and I have a > 40 hour job + I'm a secretary for my kanoeing club.

@MaartenBodewes oh well, as long as you enjoy that :)

Hey, sorry for stepping into your conversation. I want to thank all of you for the great work, in particular @mikeazo, who's leaving the charge.

Mainly the sea-kayaking itself ... but without club there is certainly less kayaking to do. Went to a winter weekend and Point du Raz this year, for instance. Tidal race over there.

step right in Daniel

@MaartenBodewes For the record, according to the current flag count, I've handled more than double the number of flags as e-sushi. :) (though he beats me in every other category).

@Daniel don't be distracted by @MaartenBodewes's and mine off-topic-ness :P

Including one order of magnitude more edits

What's the flag count on a weekly base approximately?

(I won't ask about the days, I know that SE is mainly busy during the week rather than the weekend)

~10-15

(didn't know that about the flags, then again, it's not something you particularly notice if you're not directly involved, great work there)

Oh, OK, that does indeed sound manageable.

How many "tricky ones", one or two per week (tricky in the sense that it is hard to decide what to do?)

@MaartenBodewes gotta start flagging more comments then :P

Be careful what you wish for :)

@MaartenBodewes That has definitely gotten less and less and tends to increase at the beginning of college semesters :)

No more than a handful a week.

That makes sense I suppose.

e-sushi and codes are very much programmers. I'm personally in favor of having a more mathematically inclined moderator in addition to them. You're already more mathematically inclined than me (most people here are, I suppose).

Codes also handles that pretty well though, even with his coding side.

What do you think about that, would that make sense? Or would we simply rely on the regular users in case the questions or answers contain math. errors and such?

always good to have more math folks :)

That said, the people here are pretty good about helping with the moderation.

@MaartenBodewes actually my main worry is that @mikeazo was our US-based mod and now we're likely to get a European person elected

and so all mods would be within +-1h to each other

Quick question: is there some formal reputation requirement to become a moderator? (Or history has showed that such requirement exists informally?)

Definitely not a formal requirement.

@Daniel formally it's like 300 rep IIRC

but if you can self-nominate, then you can run

Informally, we only had one election so far and there sushi was the elected mod with the least amount of rep (like 5-6k back then)

But you can give it a try and run anyways

If you're convincing, you may end up being elected ;)

@SEJPM Thank you so much for the information. I'm sure there are a lot of people willing to help and contribute to the community. I'm expecting to see some of these people nominated this week, so I think I'd be better at asking and voting than introducing another candidate. Anyway, let's see how things go this week :)

@Daniel I hope I won't discourage you with the following ;)

crypto.stackexchange.com/election/2#post-55125

(damn, no one-box? sad :( )

@Daniel also IIRC SE gives away free stuff to mod candidates, so that may also be a motivation for you ;)

@SEJPM That's what I meant with good people nominating themselves. I wouldn't nominate myself for other reason rather than not having a candidate satisfying my personal concept of a good moderator, which apparently won't happen on this election. Nice!

SEJPM that's a pretty impressive badge score there. I'm still lacking a few badges and did way fewer review actions. Then again, if I vote on you this time around I'll get a shiny new silver badge to draw a bit closer :P

BTW I don't think NL and DE makes much of a difference time-zone wise, so that's no reason for me to step in.

how many mods are we actually going for, 1 or 2 mods in addition? Or does that depend on the election?

@MaartenBodewes it says on the election page on the right

we're gonna get one new and with @mikeazo stepping down we'll be at 3 again

I've always wondered: Does flagging stuff like obvious spam questions actually help the mod team? If they're online, they're going to see it anyway and close it. If they're offline they won't see the flag either... So far I've always flagged (since i lost by close-vote privilege with our step out of beta :P) but I've never been sure if I'm helping or just annoying people with useless flags.

@Maeher if there are enough spam flags, the system will auto-close and delete I think

(and you cast an implicit downvote with spam flags)

and it definitely helps with comments because I don't think mods go through the comments everyhwere (especially since they don't trigger the post being pushed to the front page)

@SEJPM huh, I did not know that

@Maeher the idea being precisely as you expressed: There may not be a mod around and they wouldn't do anything but delete anyways

also even mods are encouraged to use spam flags on such posts (theirs are binding like the close-votes)

yeah with comments, you're obviously right. I was thinking more of the spam "questions" we get every now and then.

as posts deleted by the bot for spam will also get their content hidden in the revision history (only visible to 10k+)

Well, good to know. Then I will keep flagging them.