In connection with the moderator elections, we are holding a Q&A thread for the candidates. Questions collected [from an earlier thread](http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/questions/932/2014-moderator-election-qa-question-collection) have been compiled into this one, which shall now serve as the space for the candidates to provide their answers. Not every question was compiled, but apparently when I posted the original Q&A collection, the self-answer containing our suggested questions failed to be submitted. For this reason, I've opted to collect 10 questions from the community in lieu of the usual selection of 8 plus our 2. 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](http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/revisions/4116ef36-2ef1-4c9b-b6d6-f5c95a9c43b0/view-source). 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! --- > A user posts something you find (off-topic/wrong/offensive) and you (close/delete/migrate) the (question/comment). The user posts about it in Meta and the post gets a lot of upvotes. Answers are posted both in favor of you action and and criticising your action; both get upvotes. How do you decide what to do next? > A quite specific question: **what is your position with respect to undergraduate questions?** A significant part of my moderator actions have been to arbitrate if a question was on-topic or not, because it was somehow related to undergraduate studies. It can often be argued that some questions can however easily generalise to graduate studies, which would make them on topic. So, what is your position? [Some example positions](http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/963/) > How will you use your "binding vote" moderator privileges? Let the community weigh in first on most close, reopen, delete, undelete, etc. operations? Let the community decide on things that could conceivably be subjective, but take action on non-controversial matters immediately? Act to deliberately to keep the direction of the site on track? Vote as if you were a normal user, disregarding your role and the binding nature? > What change would you like to make in how the site is currently moderated, and how would you go about implementing that change? > Under what conditions will you delete comments? > What is your position on boat programming questions? [See here for examples](http://meta.academia.stackexchange.com/a/965/). > How would you moderate postings where your opinion or the community's opinion and official SE policy disagree? > What is your position on the following statement from aeismail: "In the long run, Stack Exchange sites are not just about answering people's questions, but providing long-term curating of the answers"? We have some very active users who look at old questions/answers, and curate them, for instance by flagging for comment removal (typically because they are obsolete, too chatty, not constructive, etc). Will you support them in this task? Or do you rather think that content should be left unchanged as much as possible? > What is your time zone? What is the time period you are available for moderating our site everyday? Please specify the answer in UTC format. > What activities on the site suggest that you would be a good moderator? If you are currently a moderator, do you believe you've carried out the role effectively?