Moderator vacation

moderator_vacation.md

Moderator vacation

Stack Overflow uniquely requires moderators to operate with a standard of duty. Even so, moderators generally feel a sense of obligation to be around in case of problems. Such voluntary dedication is much appreciated and often means people really enjoy what they are doing. But everyone needs a vacation from time to time.

Currently, we have no good way for moderators to communicate their vacation plans to either to Community Managers (we suggest they email us), other moderators (this usually happens in chat) or other users (more on this momentarily). In addition, the temptation remains to "just handle that one flag" if a moderator happens to browse their site while theoretically off-duty. Finally, I believe "vacation" might be a graceful way for moderators to step down if the job stops being fun and rewarding.

Proposal

Provide moderator with a vacation toggle they can flip to indicate they are temporarily off-duty. It will have the following effects:

1. The diamond will be removed from the user's display name everywhere on the site.
2. All moderator abilities on the site will be unavailable for the duration of the vacation. That includes access to the flag queue and the flag indicator.
3. Their name will remain on the moderators tab of the Users page (/users?tab=moderators), but the diamond will be absent there too.
4. Moderators will retain their abilities on chat (to keep in touch with their colleagues in moderator rooms) and will receive moderator newsletters via email. (Ideally, newsletters would be saved up like a newspaper vacation hold, but let's not over-complicate this.)

When the vacation period is over, the moderator may flip the toggle to go back on duty. However, there are two important restrictions:

1. Vacations must be at least a week long. The primary motive is to prevent moderators from flipping to non-moderator status to cast a non-binding close vote (or somesuch) and returning to moderator status immediately. But it also helps enforce the idea that the feature is about taking significant time off and not just taking every weekend off. (Feel free to take the weekend off, by the way. There's just no need for this particular feature in that case.)
2. Moderators who take more than three months off in a (calendar?) year will need to contact the community team in order to regain access. This will allow moderators to retire from the position without drama or guilt. Retired moderators would not necessarily be guaranteed their position back, but it would be a rare exception for us to deny someone who wants to become active again.

Open Questions

1. Is this a feature long-serving moderators even want?
2. Are the access options appropriate for a vacationing moderator?
3. Instead of removing the diamond, should moderators on vacation be signified some other way? (Such as an outline of a diamond.)
4. Should there be a shorter minimum or different maximum vacation?
5. Is there anything I missed?

Great write up.

1. When I go away, it's usually to have a 4-day weekend; I can count on one hand since I was 16 how many times I have been away from home for longer than 7 days (twice to camp, once to Disneyland, twice to Cuba). I can count on a notepad how many 4-day vacations I've taken (3/year to one destination, 2x to another, and scattered here and there for other weekend trips). The minimum time should be shorter. I'd suggest 3 days minimum, again, to discourage the Weekend effect described above.
2. We should be able to toggle a switch if we're wanting to come back early, and gain our powers, when on a desktop browser. I know I do lots of moderation from my cell phone, such as deleting spam posts or closing off-topic questions; I believe this type of thing should be blocked outright (mobile access? No mod privileges at all on vacation!) to encourage us to put down the phone.
3. Leave the diamond as-is, to prevent any possible panic, and for our own privacy. I don't mind other mods on my site knowing when I'm away (as you stated, it happens in Chat), but I'd prefer that regular users not know that I'm gone. Leave the diamond filled in; that also allows the previous suggestion of having an outlined diamond for retired mods, too.

Any sort of visual indication that the mod is currently not-actively-a-mod seems only good for drama. "OH MY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR DIAMOND/BLUE."

A moderator who wants a vacation probably wants less drama, not more, and they definitely don't want any drama to be about them.

Once three months pass I guess it's fair game to make the cosmetic change happen, since you have lost your right to be a monkey with a gun in there hand. That also means that community managers who do not wish to reinstate a moderator's access can keep the discussion between them and the modrater, and nothing visually changes on the site.

If we want a vacation, I see two reasons:

• We are actually going on a vacation
• We need a small break

In both cases, what do we do? We just let other's know. Personally, I doubt that I need to tell others in the community that I'm heading out to visit family or something like that, and if I'm going to be away for a while, I'll just want to let my fellow mods know. Maybe I'll let some of the community know. If I'm taking a break to cool down, then I doubt I'll ever want people in the community to know. If something major happened, that will not be a fun thing for others to handle. I could see it being viewed a bit like a "mod departure" - and would just spark arguments between supporters and well... non-supporters on places like chat and meta.

I don't see much of a purpose to this, and I doubt it would serve that much of a real benefit to anyone else. To fix the informal way of letting others' know I'll be gone, I'll probably just want a little switch on my profile available to moderators/community managers to signal "hey, I'm a little less active!" People will still come on a little bit, and they might want some mod-handling duties, like flags, but it lets people know that they won't be active for serious things, such as mod messages or suspensions.

I'd like that above functionality. To stop people from using it for stuff like work (or school in my case), maybe we only need it for 3 days? This provides some leeway if someone goes on a weekend work trip, or if I've got something like final exams.

About the hollow diamond idea, I'm not sure I like it. Maybe that's because I support retired mods having a hollowed diamond, but also because it shows the community that something is up.

I agree with @Zizouz212 on this.