15

In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected from an earlier thread have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. As noted, not every question was compiled - the top 8 voted questions were selected along with our default 2 questions for a total of 10 questions.

As a candidate, your job is simple - post an answer to this question, citing each of the questions and then post your answer to each question given in that same answer. For your convenience, I will include all of the questions in quote format with a break in between each, suitable for you to insert your answers. Just copy the whole thing after the first set of three dashes.Please consider putting your name at the top of your post so that readers will know who you are before they finish reading everything you have written, and also including a link to your answer on your nomination post.

Once all the answers have been compiled, this will serve as a transcript for voters to view the thoughts of their candidates, and will be appropriately linked in the Election page.

Good luck to all of the candidates!

Oh, and when you've completed your answer, please provide a link to it after this blurb here, before that set of three dashes. Please leave the list of links in the order of submission.

To save scrolling here are links to the submissions from each candidate (in order of submission):


  1. Recently (a) single user(s) have been on a spree of intensive editing of old posts , often mostly tag edits, which has led to some annoyance with other users in chat & comments. What is your stance on this, do you intend to intervene and if so, how?

  2. Two users are fighting, leaving snipey comments on questions/answers, in chat, etc. How would you deal with this?

  3. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

  4. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

  5. You see a question / answer that you personally consider naive, stupid, lying, missing info, etc. How do you handle this as a moderator? How do you respond to the user?

  6. As an elected moderator, how much time will you be able to contribute to Travel SE tasks, at what time of the day and in which time zone? Will you have regular offline periods (we all love travelling) that you can foresee already?

  7. Every so often the Travel Chat Room devolves a bit into mini fights between users, or worse, a group hate of a user on the site who has no knowledge of the chat. How would you engage and prevent the chat from scaring off new people, causing problems and starting disagreements?

  8. What do you intend to change, improve and keep as it is about how moderation is currently run on Travel SE?

  9. Travel SE has had some competitions in the past (most recently the bounty bonanza, some answering competitions and a double-site hats competition with Expats). As an elected moderator, do you intend to initiate/support/incentivize more such competitions? (Maybe you even have some ideas to share?)

  10. I find that there is very little guidance as to how to use tags and what is a good structure for tags. Given that tagging and tag edits have become somewhat controversial recently: What is your personal best practice in terms of tag usage? Do you intend to (interacting with the community and the other mods) create a semi-official guideline for tagging (which tags to use and create, for Travel SE only of course) as a moderator?

  • 1
    We definitely need another bounty bonanza! Plus I do wish that person alluded to in dot point 1 would STOP! Plus I wish that the user we lost due to racial hate would come back! – Gayot Fow Feb 13 '17 at 22:52
  • I can't edit the question to add the link to my answer, sorry. I don't think I have enough rep to do that. – Joel Damien Feb 14 '17 at 10:35
  • 1
    @JoelDamien pnuts took care of that. – JoErNanO Feb 14 '17 at 16:30
7

JoErNaNO

  1. Recently (a) single user(s) have been on a spree of intensive editing of old posts , often mostly tag edits, which has led to some annoyance with other users in chat & comments. What is your stance on this, do you intend to intervene and if so, how?

I believe in editing to improve quality, be it a content edit, a tag edit, or a title edit. I also believe that editing old posts to improve them and to render them compatible with our current guidelines and standards makes perfect sense. The goal of SE is sites is not solely to answer questions but also to build a library of Q&A to serve as a reference. To that purpose one must perform housekeeping duties every so often. Going back to improve old posts is a part of such housekeeping duties.

Unfortunately, the way SE sites are designed, edited posts are bumped to the top of the page. A corollary to this problem is that multiple subsequent edits to different posts can flood the home page and cause the newer questions to "disappear" below the edited ones. The thing is that this is a classic case of [tag:status-bydesign] and should be accepted as such. What we can do is maybe try to find ways to work around the problem.

In the past we discussed strategies to avoid flooding the home page, by limiting the number of edits in a short period of time, and/or attempting to edit the posts during the sleepy periods of site activity. Tricks like these can certainly work, however they can be sometimes limiting and can lead users to forget about editing posts all together. If one does not wish to miss a new question within edited ones, a trick I just discovered is to use the "Newest" tab on the Questions page as this does not seem to show recently edited questions as new:

Newest questions tab]

Personally, I am perfectly fine with edit sprees flooding the home page, provided these aim at improving the quality of the post. Retagging a questions is definitely a way to do so.

  1. Two users are fighting, leaving snipey comments on questions/answers, in chat, etc. How would you deal with this?

Direct contact is IMHO the way to go about this, using private messages to ask both users to calm down, followed by a clean-up of the comments in chat. The goal of the site is to gather quality questions and answers. Snipey comments add no quality to the post.

In the chat one could be more lenient, provided that the users remain respectful of one another. We've had several more or less heated discussions on Travel chat already. It happened that some people took words too far and were temporarily suspended. No abusive, offensive, or rude behaviour should be tolerated anywhere on the site.

  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I have seen this happen on the site as a normal user. My approach has always been to talk directly to the user. As a mod I would do the same. I would contact the user explaining the situation and asking them for a change in behaviour, and telling them that mods will be closely monitoring their activity to ensure this happens. If this doesn't work then one can always opt for a suspension. Of course it is always sad to see valuable users get suspended over such attitude problems. Nevertheless, in my opinion Rule 1 - Be nice is more important than reputation acquired by posting valuable content.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

I believe in open communication. The first thing to do in this case would be to contact that moderator to discuss the issue. I don't think that I am always right. On the contrary, since I'm the one with the issue there's a high chance that I might have misinterpreted something about the question. Contacting the moderator will allow me to understand their position and maybe even learn something new about the site. If, after discussing, the two of us can't resolve the problem, I believe that summoning the rest of the moderator team for an open discussion would definitely help to reach consensus. In addition, on Travel we have several active users which can be consulted to aid in solving disputes like these.

  1. You see a question / answer that you personally consider naive, stupid, lying, missing info, etc. How do you handle this as a moderator? How do you respond to the user?

In my opinion 'naive' and 'stupid' are both subjective criteria and should have no bearing when making decisions on posts and users on SE sites. On the other hand if a post is lying or missing information and it is salvageable then it should be salvaged. The first thing I would do would be to leave a comment asking the OP to improve the post by adding the missing information and/or removing the incorrect one. If the post is a question I'd vote to close it so as to avoid attracting wrong/misguided answers. I would then wait a few days to see if the situation changes. If not then I would opt for the deletion of the post due to its low quality.

  1. As an elected moderator, how much time will you be able to contribute to Travel SE tasks, at what time of the day and in which time zone? Will you have regular offline periods (we all love travelling) that you can foresee already?

As a regular user I visit Travel every day, be it from a browser or from the mobile app. I am also always pingable in chat. I don't really have a fixed time, but I tend to be around when I am not sleeping. My current time zone is GMT+1. As of today I cannot really foresee any long offline period in the near future.

  1. Every so often the Travel Chat Room devolves a bit into mini fights between users, or worse, a group hate of a user on the site who has no knowledge of the chat. How would you engage and prevent the chat from scaring off new people, causing problems and starting disagreements?

As a new user I did not find the chat scary. I actually found it much easier than the main site, since the chat rules seem to be softer. For this reason I often invite users to the chat, so that one can discuss with a bit more freedom. New users should be welcomed and not bit. This applies to the chat too. Mini fights or group hates should have no place on the chat. However, heated yet polite discussions can, and probably even should, happen freely.

  1. What do you intend to change, improve and keep as it is about how moderation is currently run on Travel SE?

I think the current moderator team has been doing an excellent job. What the current team needs is an extra set of helping hands. What I would do to improve moderator work is ensuring that all moderators are available, or at least pingable on chat. This is currently not the case, with only 2 out of the 4 moderators being pingable. Having moderators readily available on chat helps in quickly resolving issues. In addition we often have long discussions in chat on how to run certain aspects of the site (lately the tagging rework comes to mind). Having a mod participating live in such discussions would obviously help immensely.

As a non-mod I strive to ensure that the site rules are respected by all, including myself, in my day to day activity on the site and in the chat. This is exactly what I will keep on doing, whether I am elected or not.

  1. Travel SE has had some competitions in the past (most recently the bounty bonanza, some answering competitions and a double-site hats competition with Expats). As an elected moderator, do you intend to initiate/support/incentivize more such competitions? (Maybe you even have some ideas to share?)

I am the Reigning Travel SE Answerathon Champion Defend it with Your Life. I participated in most of the competitions we ran. I even co-organised some of them. GayotFow and I concocted The Great 5 Year Anniversary Bounty Bonanza together one lonely day in chat. Gayot came up with the idea and together we pushed it to unforeseen results. Although I did not win that competition specifically I still believe that these competitions are what makes Travel travel. We are a community as well as a Q&A website. We bring people with common interests together and share experiences. As an elected moderator, I absolutely intend to initiate/support/incentivise more such competitions.

  1. I find that there is very little guidance as to how to use tags and what is a good structure for tags. Given that tagging and tag edits have become somewhat controversial recently: What is your personal best practice in terms of tag usage? Do you intend to (interacting with the community and the other mods) create a semi-official guideline for tagging (which tags to use and create, for Travel SE only of course) as a moderator?

The single best practice when in doubt is to ask on Meta. I have done this countless times, asking about which tags to use, create, rename, delete etc. Asking a Meta question helps in gathering more than one opinion to make an informed decision. Very often, other users have their own best practices which can then be uses as site-wide practices.

Personally I believe that the more the tags the easier it is to find a question. Hence I am in favour of tag editing, and of giving reputation for those tag edits. I myself earned 548 reputation from suggested edits (ask me how I know and I might teach you something new about SE sites), most of which were tag edits.

Tags should be relevant, well-formed and properly explained using both excerpt and wiki. There is obviously no single tagging strategy out there. Nevertheless it makes sense to define one that is unique to Travel and with which we should all comply. I am absolutely in favour of discussing with everyone on Meta in order to concoct such a strategy.

5

Dorothy

  1. Recently (a) single user(s) have been on a spree of intensive editing of old posts , often mostly tag edits, which has led to some annoyance with other users in chat & comments. What is your stance on this, do you intend to intervene and if so, how?

I have no objection to those edits, as tags can add to the value of posts, particularly older items. If we have someone who is willing to clean out the closets, then have at it. Should the activity be completely unnecessary or irrelevant, then a group chat may be in order to reach a collective understanding and agreement.

  1. Two users are fighting, leaving snipey comments on questions/answers, in chat, etc. How would you deal with this?

As uncomfortable as it makes some of us, it happens, but is completely inappropriate as comments on Q & A. The comments should be removed and the users go to chat, and reminded to play nice and that one can express oneself without being nasty or rude or inappropriate.

  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

There can be a significant difference between the value of answers and the integrity of the site. Users who are less experience with the format and rules of SE Travel can get ahead of themselves, and the veterans are tolerant, instructive, and welcoming, allowing newbies to settle in and continue to contribute. From what I've seen and experienced here, those who don't respond well to respectful feedback leave and those who do stay.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Discuss it with that mod to understand their reasoning and, should we not agree, collectively have a discussion amongst all mods; majority rules.

  1. You see a question / answer that you personally consider naive, stupid, lying, missing info, etc. How do you handle this as a moderator? How do you respond to the user?

First, no question should be viewed as naive or stupid and, sure OP may be lying or withholding information. A couple of questions in comment can help to get clarifications needed to elicit useful answers. As for an answer that falls short, via comment, I'd ask that user to enhance their response and, perhaps, point them toward information or links that would help them to do so.

  1. As an elected moderator, how much time will you be able to contribute to Travel SE tasks, at what time of the day and in which time zone? Will you have regular offline periods (we all love travelling) that you can foresee already?

I'm retired (yes I am, very happily) and am dead boring and the laptop is a constant companion, with the SETravel open in my browser tab 18 hours a day and, as some have noticed, I'm slightly compulsive. Okay, so TMI. I'm on the East coast of the US, GMT -5 (soon to be -6 with Daylight Savings Time).

  1. Every so often the Travel Chat Room devolves a bit into mini fights between users, or worse, a group hate of a user on the site who has no knowledge of the chat. How would you engage and prevent the chat from scaring off new people, causing problems and starting disagreements?

Again, it happens but, as mentioned above, I have found this group to be rather tolerant of the newbies, and even the oldies. I think chat is a healthy venue for expressing annoyance, frustration, or irritation or any number of topics, including issues with users. However, at some point and in all fairness, the user being discussed should be invited into the room.

  1. What do you intend to change, improve and keep as it is about how moderation is currently run on Travel SE?

Absolutely nothing: I don't have the knowledge or experience to alter anything. After an appropriate learning curse, we can have that discussion.

  1. Travel SE has had some competitions in the past (most recently the bounty bonanza, some answering competitions and a double-site hats competition with Expats). As an elected moderator, do you intend to initiate/support/incentivize more such competitions? (Maybe you even have some ideas to share?)

I'm a big believer in having this sort of fun, especially when what you do is serious and requires the effort that so many of the users contribute. In addition to the existing bonuses, I'd like to find a way to reward those who give great answers, and the OP never accepts or acknowledges the contribution (particularly those refer to as hit-and-run).

  1. I find that there is very little guidance as to how to use tags and what is a good structure for tags. Given that tagging and tag edits have become somewhat controversial recently: What is your personal best practice in terms of tag usage? Do you intend to (interacting with the community and the other mods) create a semi-official guideline for tagging (which tags to use and create, for Travel SE only of course) as a moderator?

As I waited for more than a year before even attempting to tag, I found it was better to let those with greater expertise do it. It may be useful to create a tag tutorial, or offer up a tag tutor in a chat room to educate those less accustomed to this feature.

5

Rory

  1. Recently (a) single user(s) have been on a spree of intensive editing of old posts , often mostly tag edits, which has led to some annoyance with other users in chat & comments. What is your stance on this, do you intend to intervene and if so, how?

While I am in favour of cleanup activities, I have seen a couple that maxed out the front page and annoyed everyone - so my take on it is to politely ask the user in question to just calm down a wee bit, as that is usually all it takes.

  1. Two users are fighting, leaving snipey comments on questions/answers, in chat, etc. How would you deal with this?

At first, warn them in a comment or chat and delete the relevant comments. If that doesn't work, short suspensions are a simple next step.

  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Having had a couple of these over the past couple of years, the technique that appears to work best for me is to warn them privately, and yes, actually suspend as needed. This has helped turn round a couple of folks who now still produce high value answers, but far less flags.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Discuss it with them. It is that simple. It is quite rare, but it does happen, and the best plan is discussion. If the community are flagging the decision, then it is critical that mods discuss it anyway, but if it is simple disagreement between me and another mod, then we can work out an answer, which may be to do nothing.

  1. You see a question / answer that you personally consider naive, stupid, lying, missing info, etc. How do you handle this as a moderator? How do you respond to the user?

This is an odd question - for naive, stupid or missing info, but still on topic, I encourage providing info in comments or ideally by editing the post. For lying, it's not so easy - if it still makes a good post, then that probably isn't a problems such. A downvote is a useful tool in any case.

  1. As an elected moderator, how much time will you be able to contribute to Travel SE tasks, at what time of the day and in which time zone? Will you have regular offline periods (we all love travelling) that you can foresee already?

I'm in Scotland, so am usually on morning and evening, as well as lunchtime in GMT, but I also keep most of my chat rooms open in background so can respond to pings. When travelling (and I have a few coming up) I actually get more time on Stack Exchange. In looking at my existing sites, I estimate the load varies a lot - while I may be available for a few hours a day, some sites may take 5 minutes one day and then a half hour the next.

  1. Every so often the Travel Chat Room devolves a bit into mini fights between users, or worse, a group hate of a user on the site who has no knowledge of the chat. How would you engage and prevent the chat from scaring off new people, causing problems and starting disagreements?

Clamping down on this quickly is essential. It relies a bit on users flagging to make mods aware, and as soon as I could I'd initially kickmute the user's involved, or even put the chat in timeout, along with a strong warning to behave. If needed escalation as described above.

  1. What do you intend to change, improve and keep as it is about how moderation is currently run on Travel SE?

Overall, I don't think anything needs changed as such, we just need a slightly bigger moderation team, as the site is busy and we do have a wide range of cultures evidenced here, which can lead to accidental friction.

  1. Travel SE has had some competitions in the past (most recently the bounty bonanza, some answering competitions and a double-site hats competition with Expats). As an elected moderator, do you intend to initiate/support/incentivize more such competitions? (Maybe you even have some ideas to share?)

The competitions here have been some of the best I have seen on any SE site. So I would definitely support and try to come up with new ones.

  1. I find that there is very little guidance as to how to use tags and what is a good structure for tags. Given that tagging and tag edits have become somewhat controversial recently: What is your personal best practice in terms of tag usage? Do you intend to (interacting with the community and the other mods) create a semi-official guideline for tagging (which tags to use and create, for Travel SE only of course) as a moderator?

This is a general issue across many sites - although the existing mods have put reasonable guidance there already. For further guidance, I think there are parts of this across SE, so most of this should be pulling the relevant bits together and then adding as needed.

  • It is probably worth pointing out that over my mod sites I have edited over 1600 posts in that time...as well as deleting a couple of thousand offensive or spammy posts and over 15000 comments (obsolete, offensive etc) – Rory Alsop Feb 15 '17 at 9:18
  • @RoryAlsop No one cares about what you've accomplished on your other mod sites because by applying to be a moderator on Travel.SE you can only pull from what you have done within this community – yuritsuki Feb 20 '17 at 22:07
  • While providing input on a specific site is valuable, moderating is actually rather site-agnostic. The skills and experience cross site bounds, which is why I do feel it is rather relevant. – Rory Alsop Feb 20 '17 at 22:12
5

JonathanReez

  1. Recently (a) single user(s) have been on a spree of intensive editing of old posts , often mostly tag edits, which has led to some annoyance with other users in chat & comments. What is your stance on this, do you intend to intervene and if so, how?

Two options:

  • If the edits are actually useful and meaningful, I will thank the editor and ask people to be more tolerant of the behavior

  • If the edits are inappropriate, I'll ask the user to stop

'Flooding the front page' is an nonexistent issue. See here for a Meta discussion. See my esteemed colleague's post for how to use the Newest tab to avoid it. If possible, I will try to promote the idea of 'non-flooding' edits to the Admins as Mods apparently have more of an influence on them.

  1. Two users are fighting, leaving snipey comments on questions/answers, in chat, etc. How would you deal with this?

Ask both to stop and sort things out in a private chat, deploy a 1-day ban if the behavior continues.

  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

I don't remember ever seeing such a user (usually both the answers and the comments are bad), so the question is moot. Examples to the contrary are welcome.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

If I'm not 100% sure about the decision, I'd drop a link to chat and ask people to vote for reopen/undelete if they see fit. If I'm 100% sure the decision was wrong, I'd leave a comment for the other mod and reopen/undelete the post.

  1. You see a question / answer that you personally consider naive, stupid, lying, missing info, etc. How do you handle this as a moderator? How do you respond to the user?

Let the users decide - we have close/delete/down votes just for this purpose. If it's a low-rep user I'd post a template response about what's wrong with the question.

  1. As an elected moderator, how much time will you be able to contribute to Travel SE tasks, at what time of the day and in which time zone? Will you have regular offline periods (we all love travelling) that you can foresee already?

European mornings and evenings, 30 minutes per day. Same schedule if traveling. This should be more than enough for Travel.SE's stream of activity, especially with 5 mods.

  1. Every so often the Travel Chat Room devolves a bit into mini fights between users, or worse, a group hate of a user on the site who has no knowledge of the chat. How would you engage and prevent the chat from scaring off new people, causing problems and starting disagreements?

Chat is created for the very purpose of allowing the users to let off a bit of steam. No harm from occasional mini-fights as long as it sticks to chat and doesn't violate site rules.

  1. What do you intend to change, improve and keep as it is about how moderation is currently run on Travel SE?

Faster tag edits/renamings/synonymizations. Otherwise keep as-is.

  1. Travel SE has had some competitions in the past (most recently the bounty bonanza, some answering competitions and a double-site hats competition with Expats). As an elected moderator, do you intend to initiate/support/incentivize more such competitions? (Maybe you even have some ideas to share?)

The bounty bonanzas and the answering competitions are great, so I will try to organize at least one per month with the other mods. If nothing is organized we always have the 100% answer rate challenge and that deserves support as well.

  1. I find that there is very little guidance as to how to use tags and what is a good structure for tags. Given that tagging and tag edits have become somewhat controversial recently: What is your personal best practice in terms of tag usage? Do you intend to (interacting with the community and the other mods) create a semi-official guideline for tagging (which tags to use and create, for Travel SE only of course) as a moderator?

The only Travel.SE specifics are related to visa-related tagging and there should a clear guideline for those. Otherwise we should stick with the site-wide guidelines from the overlords on Meta.StackExchange, no need to create localized rules.

If anything is unclear we create a post on Meta and sort things out. Tagging is not a rigid science and it's okay if they're not 100% perfect.

  • Regarding Vote to reopen/undelete and let the community decide, note that mod's votes are binding, so if you vote to reopen or undelete, this will happen automatically. – fedorqui Feb 14 '17 at 12:31
  • @fedorqui I believe a mod can also vote as a regular user – JonathanReez Feb 14 '17 at 12:38
  • 1
    No, they cannot: their vote is always binding. – fedorqui Feb 14 '17 at 12:38
  • 1
    @fedorqui thanks, I've updated the answer – JonathanReez Feb 14 '17 at 12:42
2

Joel Damien

  1. Recently (a) single user(s) have been on a spree of intensive editing of old posts , often mostly tag edits, which has led to some annoyance with other users in chat & comments. What is your stance on this, do you intend to intervene and if so, how?

I'd judge each individual edit on it's own merits, and if it appears that these edits are not improving the questions, then I would have a word about it with the editor, and encourage them to show restraint in the future. If the behavious continues, further action may be taken as necessary.

  1. Two users are fighting, leaving snipey comments on questions/answers, in chat, etc. How would you deal with this?

I'm not sure what tools would be available to me as a community moderator (shadow bans, mutes, bans etc) but I would confront them directly together in a private chat if possible and try and resolve it there.

  1. How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?

Speak to them about how they can contribute their valuable content in a less inflammatory manner.

  1. How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?

Talk to them and try to understand their viewpoint. If an amicable understanding cannot be reached, I'd seek the advice and guidance of the other mods to see if some consensus can be reached. I dislike single-handedly going against/taking action against my peers.

  1. You see a question / answer that you personally consider naive, stupid, lying, missing info, etc. How do you handle this as a moderator? How do you respond to the user?

I don't. My personal opinion should not matter. I'll leave it for the community to decide. If it is flagged enough and/or gets a lot of negative feedback from the community, then I will take a look.

  1. As an elected moderator, how much time will you be able to contribute to Travel SE tasks, at what time of the day and in which time zone? Will you have regular offline periods (we all love travelling) that you can foresee already?

I live in Sri Lanka, so my timezone is IST, which I find generally fits in well with the downtime of mods in other timezones (from my previous community moderation experience). I can put in 1-2 hours a day intensive work if necessary, but I'll be browsing TSE casually throughout the day (at work and at home -- I'm writing this at work right now).

  1. Every so often the Travel Chat Room devolves a bit into mini fights between users, or worse, a group hate of a user on the site who has no knowledge of the chat. How would you engage and prevent the chat from scaring off new people, causing problems and starting disagreements?

I feel like this is becoming a recurring thing with me, but first I'd like to talk to the users in question, and encourage them to behave more decently. Should that not work, mutes and bans will come into effect as appropriate.

  1. What do you intend to change, improve and keep as it is about how moderation is currently run on Travel SE?

I don't know much about how moderation currently works behind the scenes at TSE. But I feel like out current mods are doing a decent job, and as such I'll try to learn from them and share my ideas whenever I can.

  1. Travel SE has had some competitions in the past (most recently the bounty bonanza, some answering competitions and a double-site hats competition with Expats). As an elected moderator, do you intend to initiate/support/incentivize more such competitions? (Maybe you even have some ideas to share?)

I love, love, loved the bounty bonanza, and I will most certainly support and initiate similar events.

  1. I find that there is very little guidance as to how to use tags and what is a good structure for tags. Given that tagging and tag edits have become somewhat controversial recently: What is your personal best practice in terms of tag usage? Do you intend to (interacting with the community and the other mods) create a semi-official guideline for tagging (which tags to use and create, for Travel SE only of course) as a moderator?

A wiki-based guideline for tagging is overdue, imo. Together with the other mods I'd like to implement something like that. The thing is, we do have useful, clear and defined tags, it's just most people don't know how to use them.

  • 1
    See here and here for the tools available to moderators. :) – JoErNanO Feb 14 '17 at 16:37
  • Thanks Joe! That first link was super helpful. – Joel Damien Feb 15 '17 at 6:25
  • The Meta.SE FAQ are an awesome source of valuable information. Never forget. :) – JoErNanO Feb 15 '17 at 9:34

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https://travel.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4318/2017-moderator-election-qa-questionnaire/4322
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