2013 Moderator Election

After three years on this site, it is time to put my name forward for election as moderator.

My philosophy towards moderation is that less is generally better, but none is worse. It is better to guide someone towards accepted behaviour than it is to punish them for unwelcome behaviour. I particularly like this point from A Theory of Moderation:

Your goal is to guide the community with gentle — but firm — intervention. Respect your fellow community members at all times; demonstrate fairness and impartiality in your actions.

Recently, we've seen a lot of 1-rep users asking weak questions and posting weak answers. But, they've already cleared the first hurdle in showing up and posting something. I would like to take on a role of welcoming and guiding these new users and groom them into contributing members of our community.

I am the site's foremost advocate of Robertson Screwdriving Technology. I do recognize Torx as a superior product, but limited availability of fasteners force me to choose Robertson.

I built a brick pizza oven with my bare hands with no prior masonry experience and didn't burn my house down. Nuff said?

My out of the box thinking has helped many visitors to the site, I'm active in the chatroom and usually offer some comic relief.

I would be honored to help out the community utilizing this role.

I would like to be a moderator on Home Improvement because the site has been incredibly useful to me and I want to help keep it useful to others.

I've been a member of this site since the day it launched and realized early on that this was one site that I really wanted to succeed. During the site's beta, I put a lot of effort into asking and answering questions to help ensure it would graduate. While I'm not posting at anything like the rate I used to, I'm still by far the most active user on the site overall in other aspects of community moderation: editing, working in the review queues, flagging and to a lesser extent commenting.

Some reasons I'd be a good moderator:

• I've been a Pro Tempore moderator on Gardening SE since February 2013 so I'm already familiar with the job.
• I'm already in tune with the other moderators here, as witnessed by the number of helpful flags I've raised.
• I've visited the site every day since launch, usually several times a day, so any moderation issues would be addressed quickly.
• I've been active on meta, in the early days to help define the site scope, and more recently helping others to use the site.

When it comes to DIY skills, I'm pretty handy, and my rep and activity history attests to that, but this is a DIY site, but being skilled at DIY doesn't necessarily make someone a good moderator.

I began participating on electronic community sites in the 1980s and my first experience as a moderator came when I ran my own electronic bulletin board while in High School. (If you google it you can still find archaic references to The Wood Shop BBS based in Wheeling WV and later Morgantown WV - that was me.)

I've been moderating forums on the internet in one form or another for approaching 30 years. I helped run eq.stratics.com in the 2000's, founded PilotsOfAmerica.com, and have continued running a small private online gaming community website for about 15 years now.

A moderator's job on a site like this isn't to meddle in the community, but to simply help maintain and protect it. I've got decades of experience in identifying baleful outside influences such as spammers, trolls, and other types who's goal is to disrupt a community, not uplift it.

I care about keeping this site strong, and so I submit my name for your consideration.

Thank you.