- What voting practices would you encourage users to adopt? This kind of dates back to Why aren't people voting? and how to encourage a positive community through voting. How can we use our votes to encourage useful questions and answers?
a. I would encourage users to upvote both Questions and Answers. We see far too many Answers being upvoted than we do Questions.
b. If a question is clearly written and demonstrates that a reasonable attempt has been made to solve or understand it, I think it merits an upvote.
c. I would discourage users from downvoting questions from new users. To me, that's a poor way to welcome someone to our forum.
d. Even for users with reputation, if you're going to downvote, take a moment to explain what's "wrong" with their post and how they can improve it.
- Are you currently employed by Salesforce (Such as the Developer Evangelists)? We've previously had @metadaddy as a moderator who was at the time on the Salesforce Developer Evangelists team. I felt this was a large benefit to the SFSE community as a bridge into Salesforce. It's certainly not a requirement to being a moderator.
a. No, I'm not employed by Salesforce. As an MVP, I do have additional access to many resources within Salesforce that others may not have which often includes the ability to reach out to product managers.
b. Over the years, I've cultivated many resources and have learned how to "work the sytstem" where I can. I've often used #AskSalesforce on Twitter to get Salesforce Support to look at questions here on SF.SE. Doing that has frequently assisted users in getting cases filed to receive the attention they needed from Salesforce in resolving their issues.
- How do you plan to manage the quality of new user posts? We get a flood of new users each month, and in general that is a good thing! We want our community to grow. But the question quality is often quite poor, and there is a learning curve to adding valuable content on the Stack Exchange, with different subtleties for questions and answers.
a. I've frequently spoken out in Meta on how important I felt it was that we be welcoming toward new users instead of downvoting their questions without making helpful suggestions on how to improve their questions. You'll see this in answers I've posted on Meta like A:Repetive Questions or A:How to Encourage Better Questions?.
b. As I said above, I would discourage users from downvoting questions from new users. To me, that's a poor way to welcome someone to our forum. Instead, I recommend using one of the many snippets I posted in this answer on Meta to politely welcome new users to SF.SE while also helping them learn how our forum works; something which I increasingly see users doing. Pointing them to a helpful resource like a relevant Trailhead Module to get what they need is always good too.
- 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?
a. We're all here to learn. Some of us have "different" things we need to learn in life. Rarely does one "win" a debate on the internet. That may be a lesson those users may need to learn.
b. Sometimes being given a "time out" away from the forum can provide them with a chance to gain the perspective they need to learn that lesson; allowing them to come back with a new perspective. These things can be handled quietly without "shaming" anyone publicly.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc a question that you feel shouldn't have been?
a. I have great respect for the other mods here on SF.SE. They have far more experience at this than I do. I can always ask what their reasoning was behind the decision and calmly explain mine. They may have reasons that I didn't see or understand. We can agree to disagree and I can learn from their experience.
b. Ultimately, this is a team effort where everyone will be doing their "best". That's all we can expect. It's important that we support one another's decisions.
- As a moderator, how can we help to increase the acceptance rate? being with the site for few years now, one thing I see different compared to salesforce developer forums or success community is a large percentage of our questions stays open without any accepted answers. how can moderators pitch in to help increase this and what considerations should be taken care in doing this?
a. When I see a user "thank" someone in comments for an answer that's been given, I'd see that as an opportunity to explain how the forum works and drop one of my snippets on them along the lines of:
"@(username) Community etiquette is to help others by marking your question as solved through checking the answer that resolved your issue. If you don't, it leaves the impression to anyone who searches the topic later that your question wasn't answered to your satisfaction. Once you have sufficient reputation, you can also upvote posts and answers."
- How would you encourage User participation off SFSE? I haven't been fortunate to go to Dreamforce (yet!), but do attend the Salesforce World Tour in London and I've often seen posts around Dreamforce and other World Tour meetups which is great. How might a moderator go about encouraging people to engage outside of Stack Exchange?
a. I think it's great when users get together outside of the forum, something I've done myself. There are many avenues for doing that, including Dreamforce, UserGroups, Developer User Groups, World Tours, the "Dreamin" events, etc.
b. Let me first say that these events are jam packed full of activities to begin with so scheduling time for SF.SE users to gather together can be a challenge.
c. This is really going to be up to someone taking the lead who's attending these events to organize a time and place to meet and I'll fully support posts in Meta for anyone who wants to organize a get together at one of these events.
d. Beyond that, I don't see it as falling within this forum's purpose or a moderator's duties to organize events.
- How would you be managing the flag/action to be taken on the SFSE in parallel to your daily work? As the site in continuously growing and everyday new users joining it. This would generate a lot of expected and unexpected posts to the site which require action by moderators. I would like the know response time to be taken by moderator to resolve those actions. Do you commit to allocate a time slot to investigate and resolve flags?
a. I'm here nearly every day for at least an hour and often more now that I've finally adjusted to the added load that comes with becoming an MVP (believe me when I say it's more than a bit overwhelming at first).
b. I think people know and recognize that I've been here consistently for the last several years and I don't see that changing.
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
a. Most of us don't get to see what moderators actually do. Their most important responsibilities are to handle flagged posts and to review what happens in the queues that may or may not be appropriate. They also represent us on Meta.
b. They also migrate posts that didn't belong elsewhere from meta or from the main forum to meta, etc.
c. Now that I've had the reputation to see it, I know they have the tools to identify and do what's needed to shut down extended conversations that need to be moved to chat.
d. They can also use their black diamond to immediately delete spam or close inappropriate posts.
e. In many ways, they're the primary "curators" of the forum's archive of posts.
f. One of the most effective things they can do is set the "tone" of the forum with the comments they make below posts.
- In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
a. As I'm now over 25k, reachine the above repution levels is rather a moot issue for me. I'm not here to gain reputation.
b. I'm here to "pass it forward" and help others "learn to fish". Being a moderator would be a different way of doing that for me.
c. It would be continuing to contribute to the success of this forum while working in conjunction with @MattLacey and @SamuelDeRycke, both of whom I consider friends. I've met both of them in person and we've talked outside the forum. I think I'd work well with both of them.
