Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Users Search
Help Dashboard Sign In Sign Up
Q&A Code Reviews Meta
Meta
Posts Tags Edits
Ask Question

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Call for moderators (2025)

Post

Call for moderators (2025)

+4
−0

The Software Development community on Codidact recently reached an important milestone. Thank you to everyone who invests in building this community.

We'd like to ask for a little more help. Alexei has been doing an outstanding job as a (currently solo) moderator, but it's better to have more than one. We had another moderator who later stepped down and at the time we asked for nominations for a replacement. We didn't get any volunteers then, but time has passed, the community has grown, we've discussed this with Alexei, and we all feel this is a good time to ask again.

Moderating isn't a lot of work and both the Codidact team and your fellow moderators are prepared to support you and help you learn.

What do moderators do? On Codidact they:

  • handle flags (there aren't a lot of these at the moment, but there are some)

  • have all the tools -- close/reopen, delete/undelete, locks, user warnings/suspensions when needed (rare we hope), create help topics, and more

  • act as representatives of the community when requesting changes from the Codidact team (for example, to let us know about a meta consensus for a configuration change)

  • help the community work out its direction, policies, needs, etc on meta -- anybody can and should start these discussions, of course, but we hope that moderators will be active participants

Are you interested in being a moderator here? Would you like to nominate someone else? Please use answers here, one answer per candidate, to nominate yourself or others.

Do you have questions? Please ask!

We haven't laid out an election process here, I know. This post is to gauge interest. If we see one or two very positively-received (and accepted) nominations, I don't see why we wouldn't just go ahead and appoint those folks. This is how we got the moderators we've had so far. If there are a lot of candidates or there are downvotes on nominations, we'll need to do more to determine what this community wants. If you have other suggestions on how we should conduct a contested selection, please speak up! This decision belongs to the community; staff are here to facilitate. (Alexei and I waffled on which of us should post this, by the way.)

discussion moderators
posted about 8 hours ago
5h ago
user card
Monica Cellio‭ staff
2580 reputation 16 35 358 60
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

Track rails for progress and elections (3 comments)
Track rails for progress and elections
Andreas is speechless at the number of bird deaths‭ wrote about 6 hours ago
copy link

There's not a whole lot of information in the post in regards to how one or multiple new moderators are selected from the nominees, nor the process for how and when that happens. I'm assuming it would be a decision weighted by the staff team at Codidact, which it nonetheless should be, as the staff team is generally trusted to guard entry to a moderator position for those actually qualified. Understandably, it's hard and perhaps even counter-productive to lay out any sort of formal process at a point in time where there might not be enough activity for it to make a whole lot of sense. But I'd appreciate at least a little bit of reflection on that, in the post.

Andreas is speechless at the number of bird deaths‭ wrote about 6 hours ago
copy link

Ideally, the process of getting titled as a moderator is as much a decision that belongs in the community as a whole. An election might be the correct course of action, however, after 15 years at SE, we have seen some limitations and important drawbacks with the obvious answer to community democracy in the form of moderator elections. So it's definitely more intricate than makes it suitable as an immediate implementation at this point.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 5 hours ago
copy link

This is a good point: we failed to say anything about selection. This decision belongs to the community, not the staff, as much as possible. If we get one nomination and all the votes are upvotes, we'd just appoint that person (uncontroversial). If there are a bunch of nominations or some have negative votes, we'll need to do more work to assess the community's support.