2026 Moderator Election

nomination began

Jan 27 at 16:00

election begins

in 2 days

election ends

in 10 days

candidates

positions

Nomination Phase

In the nomination phase, any community member in good standing with more than 300 reputation (and 18 or up) may nominate themselves to be a community moderator.

Nominees are required to construct a small introduction to describe why they might make a good community moderator. Comments are active during the length of the nomination phase – please comment freely, particularly if there is any way a nominee introduction can be improved or refined to be more clear.

All nominees are displayed in reverse order of nomination.

Nominations are not binding; nominees may withdraw at their discretion at any point during the nomination phase.

After 7 days, the top 30 nominees, ordered by reputation, advance to the primary phase. However, if there are 10 or fewer candidates, we skip directly to the election phase. If there are not enough eligible nominations at the end of the nomination period, it will be extended by one week. If there are not enough nominations after an extension the election will be canceled.

On Stack Exchange, we believe the core moderators should come from the community, and be elected by the community itself through popular vote. We hold regular elections to determine who these community moderators will be.

Community moderators are accorded the highest level of privilege on our community, and should themselves be exemplars of positive behavior and leaders within the community.

Our general criteria for moderators is as follows:

patient and fair
leads by example
shows respect for their fellow community members in their actions and words
open to some light but firm moderation to keep the community on track and resolve (hopefully) uncommon disputes and exceptions

Every election has three phases:

Nomination
Primary
Election

Please participate in the moderator elections by voting, and perhaps even by nominating yourself to be a community moderator!

Additional Links

Election Chat Room

Questionnaire

The community team has compiled questions from meta for the candidates to answer.

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?

[Answer 1 here]

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

[Answer 2 here]

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: What's the point of users commenting the URL of the question itself in the comment section? Edits by Anonymous user and approved by Community Bot Targeted troll comments

[Answer 3 here]

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 approach this? Will you encourage them to take the criticism as a constructive feedback and try to improve the question and for future questions?

[Answer 4 here]

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 all\color{red}{\textit{all}} my crayons\color{violet}{\textit{crayons}} when writing stuff\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?

[Answer 5 here]

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?

[Answer 6 here]

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?

[Answer 7 here]

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

[Answer 8 here]

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?

[Answer 9 here]

In your opinion, what do moderators do?

[Answer 10 here]

Show questions

Nomination Primary Election

This election is currently in the nomination phase. Nominations close in 2 days.

You must have more than 300 reputation to nominate yourself as a candidate in this election.

2026 Moderator Election

Additional Links

This election is currently in the nomination phase. Nominations close in 2 days. You must have more than 300 reputation to nominate yourself as a candidate in this election.

This election is currently in the nomination phase. Nominations close in 2 days.

You must have more than 300 reputation to nominate yourself as a candidate in this election.