Sorin has reached out to the people nominated for the moderator slots that we recently opened up. We’ve gotten several questions about the process that I’d like to address here.
Time commitment
We don’t have any expectation for how long anyone spends moderating. People who care about the community will find they enjoy moderating for the most part and the time flies by. If a moderator finds they aren’t enjoying moderating, they should contact @CC_Sorin or me. We can help! Also, moderators have access to a private subforum for discussing moderation with other moderators.
I like to schedule a Zoom meeting with moderators once a month. It’s not required, but I do think it’s well worth an hour of your time to meet with other moderators and the community managers.
Responsibilities
The primary responsibility of moderators is to uphold the forum rules. The primary mechanism is by handling flags. When a user flags a post on the site, moderators get a red number in the top bar. When they click that number, they get a custom dashboard with all the flags currently unhandled on the site which the can resolve. Resolving a flag might take a few seconds or it might require digging into a situation. (Again, we’re here to help!)
Moderators have other tools to help them take care of the site. These range from slowing down a thread to preventing a user from participating on the site for a period of time. There’s no expectation that moderators use these tools, but we can help new moderators learn if they are interested.
The voting process
Once Sorin and I have finalized the candidate list, I’ll post a poll for users to vote. For this round we are limiting voting to Trust Level 2 and above. Since we have two open positions, each voter will have two votes. The poll will looks something like this:
- Albus
- Bertie
- Caspian
0 voters
(Obviously this isn’t the real poll! I included it to show what the actual election will look like.)
Please note that even being nominated by fellow members of the community is a huge honor. This is also not the last time moderator slots will open up. If you miss this time, there’s always another opportunity.