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The purpose of this thread was to collect questions for the questionnaire. The questionnaire is now live, and you may find it here.

Chemistry Stack Exchange is scheduled for an election next week, 2026-01-27. In connection with that, we will be holding a Q&A with the candidates. This will be an opportunity for members of the community to pose questions to the candidates on the topic of moderation. Participation is completely voluntary.

Here’s how it’ll work:

  • Until the nomination phase, (so, until 2026-01-27 at 16:00:00Z UTC, or 11:00 am EST on the same day, give or take time to arrive for closure), this question will be open to collect potential questions from the users of the site. Post answers to this question containing any questions you would like to ask the candidates. Please only post one question per answer.

  • If your question contains a link, please use the syntax of [text](link), as that will make it easier for transcribing for the finished questionnaire.

  • This is a perfect opportunity to voice questions that are specific to your community and issues that you are running into currently.

  • We, the Community Team, will be providing a small selection of generic questions. The following two questions are guaranteed to be included:

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

  • The community team may also include the following three questions if the community doesn’t supply enough questions.

    • In your opinion, what do moderators do?
    • A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
    • In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching enough reputation to access moderator tools or become a trusted user?

  • At the start of the nomination phase, the Community Team will select up to 8 of the top voted questions submitted by the community provided in this thread, to use in addition to the aforementioned 2 guaranteed questions. We reserve some editorial control in the selection of the questions and may opt not to select a question that is tangential or irrelevant to moderation or the election. We exclude any suggested questions that are negatively scored.

    • We will post the final questionnaire on the Election page. Candidates will have the option to fill out the questionnaire, and their answers will appear beneath their intro statements.
    • This is not the only option that users have for gathering information on candidates. As a community, you are still free to, for example, hold a live chat session with your candidates to ask further questions, or perhaps clarifications from what is provided in the Q&A.

If you have any questions or feedback about this process, feel free to post as a comment here.

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How would you handle flags alleging AI content in answers or questions, and what is your stance on use of LLMs on Chemistry.SE?

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Given the dwindling nature of question activity across SE community, what will be your role as a moderator to handle this?

  • Are you going to increase your time and effort in site curation?
  • Be more engaging with newcomers and make sure that they stick to the community for a longer time?
  • Advertise the community through social media/discord/word of mouth?
  • Or do nothing
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If you are a long time member of the community, you must have observed that Chemistry.SE is infested/plagued with spams/trolls/bots. As a moderator, what will be your role to combat this?

For contexts, please refer to these posts:

  1. What's the point of users commenting the URL of the question itself in the comment section?
  2. Edits by Anonymous user and approved by Community Bot
  3. Targeted troll comments
  4. Of late, there are "answers" from unregistered users who will straight copy the comments from a user and complain about it.
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Often times newcomers becomes discouraged when/after posting their question after they face downvotes/criticism in their posts (often times, it is silent downvoting). As a moderator, how will you encourage them to take the criticism as a constructive feedback and try to improve the question and for future questions?

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  • $\begingroup$ This got a silent downvote. I think my irony metre has just broken. C'mon, what on earth is wrong with this as a question. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
  • $\begingroup$ @IanBush lol :D $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
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Many posts on Chemistry.SE combine several serious quality problems at once, such as:

  • poor English (typos, broken grammar and punctuation, non-standard abbreviations that make the post hard to understand);
  • low-quality illustrations (blurry dark photos, badly cropped pictures illegible without context, phone screenshots) and formatting (“I use $\color{red}{\textit{all}}$ my $\color{violet}{\textit{crayons}}$ when writing $\color{green}{\textit{stuff}}$”);
  • content that contains clear factual errors, lacks context, is based on a false premise, or shows minimal effort overall.

How ready are you to uphold the site’s quality bar in these cases and how would you handle such posts?

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The audience of Chemistry.SE is comprised of numerous groups (students, hobbyists, professionals, academics). How would you ensure that moderation decisions uphold high standards of scientific accuracy, clarity, and usefulness so that the site remains a reliable source for high-quality Q&As while remaining accessible to the broader audience?

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Being a moderator will allow you to single handedly close question. Will you be more lenient in closing question after your role or do whatever you did before your role? How will you act if you feel a difference in opinion with the close voters?

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