Do diamond-moderators undergo any sort of training when they get elected? (That is above and beyond the experience they accumulated over the years)
|
|
Yes and no. There are help materials available, and in the past, when new tools have been introduced there have been 'training' chats in the Teachers Lounge that new moderators still have access to. And the existing moderators (those on Stack Overflow as well as moderators on other sites) and the Community Manager team provide a lot of guidance and support. But there is no formal 'training programme', no. I don't think there is a need for one; developing one would be time consuming and expensive, while the current on-the-job training is pretty effective. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
(Source - I'm an elected mod on superuser. Ex-mod pro tem on software recommendations) Official Secret SO mod training site In a very practical sense, the time a user's spent before election is training. People get elected because enough people see them in a list of users who have stepped up for the role, decide these are folks who are the best suited from the options presented to them, and vote for them. They also work out the tools they have. Outside the soft skills, which are impossible to train for, and flag processing (which I'm told mods here do a lot), there's little that differentiates the powers of one or more high reputation users from a mod. We literally have one more queue and a handful of additional tools, reflecting the greater level of trust. I can unilaterally close questions on the site I'm a mod. A group of users can reopen them. While I do eliminate spammers - I had roughly 2000 spam flags before I was made mod, and I'm still only slightly faster than smokey assisted flags. I use meta posts to influence wider site policy with a little extra weight cause of the diamond. I occasionally use it to help out other sites with chat moderation issues. There's a few things that aren't exactly intuitive - spotting voting rings is more of an art than a skill in some cases and some mods are better than others. But things like that are why we have multiple mods per site. |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
