You can see the question: http://physicsoverflow.org/6197/who-wants-to-help-us-as-should-be-a-moderator?show=6197#q6197 . We are looking for technical moderators (you need to know the physics), who are committed to openness (no punitive measures for politically unpopular activity), inclusion and protection of text (as little censorship as possible), and complete disinclination/inability to exert power over others.
I am personally a moderator, but I have only used the moderating features lackadaisically here and there on rare occasions (sorry Dilaton, dim10). The basic thing moderators do is hide spam comments (they used to come often, less now), trace spam attacks to servers, import arxiv and other papers (this cannot yet be done by users), import stackexchange questions (import of these can cause conflicts), and some other duties I forgot (because I never do them, sorry). Unlike at stackexchange, we do not form a political elite, and our opinions carry zero extra weight, because we cannot impose punitive measures on users neither unilaterally nor through a consensus of moderators. The community decides about punitive measures, and we really try to always err on the side of openness (at least I am fanatically comitted to complete openness, and took the moderator position only to defend openness blindly like a rabid dog).
There are additional features which come with moderation, some of which I consider unethical to use for purposes other than tracking spam or identifying sock-puppetting, because they can destroy some of the anonymity protections we have firmly committed to:
1. The ability to see exactly who up/down voted a post.
2. The ability to track IP addresses of logins.
I never look at IPs (aside from a few spam attacks), I have never checked who voted on what, and I promise I won't do so in the future (except if I am needed to trace sockpuppeting or spam), as I contribute content to the physics parts, and I don't want to know more than anyone else.
But you shouldn't trust me. In the future, I suppose we should confine the potential anonymity busting features to a special class of admins who aren't involved in any academic text, or perhaps make the voting on answers publically available. We shouldn't show IPs, because these can be used to deanonymize academic contributions (how many experts on supernova collapse are there in Brussels anyway?)
We don't separate these tasks or priviledges right now, because we don't have enough people. We have had a few brush-ins with anonymity issues, and I think they are all sorted out. All of the admins are on the same page regarding no IP peeking.
Users do not get in the admin category by a Wikipedia style election, these elections generally produce a class of politicians, who don't contribute content, whose only goal in life is to acquire power over others. Wikipedia ended in an orgy of banning and blocking, and stackexchange is ending much the same way. We must never have this political disorder on this site. The moderator positions are not designed to give users power over others, and they are filled right now simply according to need and desire of the selected users to do the job, with some comments and voting on the linked question. In my opinion, in the future it should just come automatically with a sufficiently large number of academic credit points for the importing text parts, and it should be done by non-academics for the spam-tracing anonymity-busting IP-peeking parts.
The point of moderation here is never to censor, or block, users. There are fundamental rights we guarantee the users: http://physicsoverflow.org/user-rights . If we block a user, it will be for spam, for incomprehensible gibberish, for off-topic stuff, and never for taking the politically unpopular side in a debate.
But we don't want long off-topic low-level nonsense either, so we restrict the level and topic of comments. This is not specifically aimed at any user, low-level and off-topic are pretty clear calls. It seems also that the community agreed that negative reputation users will have limited commenting rights, they will only be allowed to comment on their own questions and answers. This is not to punish anyone, but to avoid off-topic or irrelevant comments. This should be the entire extent of censorship here.
Q&A (4870)
