@user7530 It also lets you have some time engaging those candidates who threw their hat into the ring mere minutes before the end of the nomination period, thus letting you think twice about who you're going to vote for.
@user7530 Which is why sometimes there are requests to have "false primaries", where the candidates essentially all pass to the final voting round, but still have to spend time under scrutiny of potential voters.
@GraceNote I agree, that the extra two weeks make this affair far too long even without a primary stage. (One of the reasons my intention was pushing the nomination phase by a few days, and not two weeks.)
I think it's excessive because we've already given everyone extra weeks to dwell on things, plus pushed the Q&A to the nomination phase which allows more analysis and discussion of candidates during the nomination phase itself. That, and the existence of a primary doesn't extend the election, it merely just occupies the first four days. Mod elections aren't meant to be a highly thought intensive process.
I'm aware, but were I given the option twixt embracing security for an old wound under the older system process, and encouraging folks to take advantage of the newer process that already adds extra days and shifts the schedule to accommodate interrogation and discussion, I'm preferential to see how the latter goes.
@GraceNote Oh yeah, I agree with that. I just want to know what happens when someone throws their hat into the ring with four minutes to spare, and refuses to answer difficult questions by making excuses, and later turns out to fail as a moderator on exactly those point.
Speaking of things that go wrong. Is there some sort of "official pressure" on the nominated candidates to answer the questionnaire?
@GraceNote, or any other diamond holder, weren't there comments underneath Alozio's answer? What happened to them? (I feel that the bar for deleting comments on election related threads should be set extremely high, or low depending on your orientation, the point being that deletions should be only in very extreme cases.)
I say on every questionnaire that it's optional for candidates to participate, with the implicit understanding that shying from answering is in itself a statement and would have its own image consequences.
@Prime Not really about reputation. More about meta participation. Voting here is a right, but not a fundamental right. It needs to be earned via some sort of participation on the meta site. Even if rather silently just by voting or even reading the meta site regularly.
I often voice my opinion that people who don't care about how the site is being run on a daily basis should not be able to vote on how the site is being run on a daily basis.
@Prime If you're aware of the hour's issues and the day's issues and the month's issues, and you have a semblance of opinion about them to the point where you can read the nominees' opinions and decide if they match how you think the issues should be resolved, then by all means, do vote.
I want to see a mod who wants to implement a system that prevents dummy accounts from up-voting stupid questions. Little to no context and copy pasted from hw. I'm sick of posts for homework with no effort and bad formatting, but hey.
I know for a fact that my sentiments are shared. I think I know who I will be voting for. Pretentiousness and pettiness must be avoided for the sake of maintaining MSE's original intent. I wish Xander would run.
They have systems in place to identify dummy accounts and ringers. They choose not to ban because it is a game of whack a mole. If you effectively get rid of terrible content (where people ask questions with no context and don't use MathJax, which is what dummy accounts usually post) then the problem shrinks.
And I haven't even spoken to the issue of bots posting lines of text with very little mathematical content.
@Prime Yes, this is a game of whack-a-mole. And except in extreme cases of specific personas being problematic people, it's nearly impossible to whack all the moles. This is something easily delegated to the community at large. This is why CRUDE is important.
I wouldn't have the patience to be a mod here. But....I must say...so much of my mathematical excitement comes from this site. Seeing other folks with similar interests (be it graph theory, number theory, or fractal geometry) is really rewarding. Being to help others is equally, if not more-so rewarding. I want that kind of thing to continue to be fostered. Excited to see some of these questionnaires completed.
@GraceNote: What happens if only two candidates end up running? Will there still be an election, or is it going to be automatically done? What happens if there end up being only one nominee?
There's 4 last I checked, but first nomination phase is extended a week, and then the election is cancelled if we didn't get more candidates in that extra week
Asaf, you said there was an instance where a moderator nominated themselves at the last minute, refused to answer question, and then did a poor job? Which election/candidate?
And, @user7530, that elected mod waiting to the last minute prior to the election was forced to resign as a mod, shortly after the 2012 election; currently, that user is still suspended since last October (2017).
Am I the only one who feels that the lack of nominees is a lot due to the fact that meta participation has become somehow limited to a handful of users most of which are either publicly reject the idea of being a moderator, are moderators, or very clearly unsuitable for being moderators?
From looking at the election history it seems the mod in question is Number/Bill Dubuque. Are there meta threads somewhere with more information such as: why he was removed shortly after the election? Why was he suspended?
I know there is reluctance to speak in plain terms about the actions of past users, but if there’s concern about an under-informed electorate, full tranparency seems much preferable to “insider allusions”
@quid moreover being a moderator is a huge time commitment and I suspect the pool of users with the time and interest to take the job is quite shallow
@user7530 It took about six months, so not so shortly. There was no official reason, but the obvious thing was continuing clashing with the rest of the moderator team. Including an instance where Bill and Qiaochu had a lock/unlock war and ended up suspending each other...
@user7530 As for the suspensions, I believe that he ended up suspended twice for a year at a time after his tenure as a moderator. But others have a better memory for that, methinks.
Mostly they were due to his very... flammable... nature. His tenure as a moderator did not help him gain favors either, I suppose.
@user7530 yes sure, "most people" did not convey well want I meant to say. I should have said "most users potentially interested" or something like that.
@user7530 Let me also add that I am sure that Bill believed that he is working "for the greater good", but it was very clear sometimes that he is not being consistent with his beliefs. He often cried with moderators acted unilaterally to open community-closed questions, but had done so himself on numerous occasions "because people were ganging up on a user". Instead of trying to mitigate the problem with discussion, he actively did the very things he claimed were problematic with other mods.
I would not say it is a "huge time commitment" though. It is of course some commitment. I am sure that there are numerous users that spend more time on the site than most moderators (me included).
One thing that was alarming from the start of his tenure was that one of the questions he avoided answering was my question about flagging and moderation experience, since Bill rarely raised flags. On the first week he ended up rejecting a few of my flags on what were clearly misguided reasons and misunderstanding of how the flagging system works form the moderator side (either that, or malice, since at the time flagging was counted by "weight" and declined flags were quite a heavy penalty...)
@AsafKaragila Wow; I hadn't realized he survived as a mod for six whole months, and not just 3 months. In any case, removing a moderator is a very exceptional action on SE, so it shouldn't surprise me that it took 6 months to do so. Maybe my memory of a "short time" is due, partly, to wishful thinking.
@amWhy Well, back then there was no protocol for removing a "rogue moderator" (in the sense that they clash with the rest of the team, not in the sense that they terrorize the village). So it took a while. In effect the cracks started to show about two months in, during the MK saga, and the breaking point was probably about three-four months through. I can probably find more information by digging deeper, but I have to head out soon. So I won't put the energy into that anymore.
@user170039 By talking about past elections and how they are relevant to something which might or might not happen in the very near future? I don't know. Are we?
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@AsafKaragila By talking about a specific user and his/her 'history'.
@user170039 Well. This whole meta chat about where to put that chat is definitely off topic, and since I'm leaving now... it will come to an abrupt end.
