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Why doesn't the https://stackexchange.com/about/moderators page have the elected/appointed date for moderators on all sites?

I see that (to name a few):

  • Christianity does display the date
  • Islam does not
  • Stack Overflow does
  • WordPress Development does
  • Joomla does not

After clicking through a few, there seems to be a correlation between beta sites not displaying the dates and "full member" (graduated/non-beta) sites displaying the dates.

Assuming that site status is the distinction, why bother making this distinction? Why not show the appointed/elected dates for all moderators regardless of the site's status? It seems strange to me.

Edit to pivot my question as a feature request:

Ultimately, my stance is: don't deny the public being able to see the start date of a moderator (regardless of how they got the gig). If I wanted to talk to the most-senior or most-junior moderator in a particular community, then the show details section could swiftly reveal that information.

Unless there is a compelling reason to keep the appointed moderators' start dates secret, please amend the page.

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    It seems indeed based on site status. Some betas now have pro-tempore elections, and even for elected moderators (e.g. me on Chess.SE) the elected date isn't shown.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Jul 21, 2019 at 9:07
  • Also, for graduated sites the mods are listed in order by election date, while on betas it appears to be random (not in order of appointment).
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jul 21, 2019 at 18:41

1 Answer 1

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You don't see dates because those moderators were never elected. All of the cases where there is no date involves moderators that were asked by the Community Managers team to act as Moderator Pro-Tempore instead.

This applies to all Islam moderators for example, but also to the Meta.SE moderators. These are sites that just don't have any moderators that gained the status through an election.

There are also sites where there is a mix of appointed and elected moderators, and there it is easier to see the difference. Community Building is one such site:

Screenshot of the Community Building section of the moderators overview, showing 3 moderators, where the first moderator listed as an 'elected 2019' column showing with a hand-drawn red circle to draw attention to that part. The other 2 moderator names do not have such a column.

Other such sites are Constructed Languages, Freelancing, MathOverflow, Medical Sciences, Tridion

Finally, there are also 3 appointed moderators. One of these was nominated in an ad-hoc process on their site meta before there was a way to run elections (random on Super User, appointed March 2010 after being nominated on the Super User Meta), or were called up to meet additional demand after an election (Michael Myers on Stack Overflow, appointed July 2010 after running in the manually run 2010 election, and waiwai933 on English Language & Usage, July 2011). The process of how additional moderators are recorded has since changed; e.g. Jon Clements was called up after an election but his moderatorship is recorded against the original 2015 election; this is now the norm.

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    So what is the risk of showing, for example, "appointed 2015"? Why bother to withhold information pertaining to the length of service? I can't imagine that anyone interested in the "moderators' details" will ever think to themselves, "Geez, this moderator was merely appointed? ...I could do without the date they started -- what a total waste of pixels." Do I need to retag/rephase my question to convert this into a feature request?
    – mickmackusa
    Commented Jul 28, 2019 at 1:13
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    @mickmackusa they are not appointed, though. Pro-tempore moderators are expected to be moderators for a limited time, while elected and appointed moderators are given a diamond “for life”. Not sure what a good label would be for them nor what that would link to.
    – Martijn Pieters
    Commented Jul 28, 2019 at 2:05
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    On Joomla Stack Exchange, I was appointed as a moderator because I was an uncontested candidate. Since then we finally had a fruitful election with 4 candidates, after which Harald was crowned a mod for a second time (after previously being one of the initial Moderator Pro-Tempore moderators, then stepping down). Pe7er was recently elected as a mod for the first time. None of us have a date next to our names, but this feature seems like a relevant detail to list for all communities.
    – mickmackusa
    Commented Nov 23, 2021 at 2:39

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