Notice: The WebPlatform project, supported by various stewards between 2012 and 2015, has been discontinued. This site is now available on github.

Volunteer Moderators for IRC and Q&A

This page provides information for those who have volunteered to be official webplatform moderators for our IRC and/or Q&A. First of all, thanks for agreeing to do this. Second, read all the notes below to make your lives as easy as possible.

What is expected of you

You are expected to act as moderators on the webplatform IRC and/or Q&A, so basically to hang around on those properties, answer questions, point people to the information they need, keep the questions on topic as much as possible, and deal with troublemakers/spammers.

There is a detailed guide to what counts as being "on topic", available at WPD/Keeping on Topic — this should give you the guidelines you need for dealing with most situations you encounter.

You aren’t expected to do this all the time, of course, and the webplatform staff will hang out on IRC/Q&A as much as possible. The aim here is just to take a bit of pressure of the webplatform.org guys, as moderating these venues 24/7 is a really time consuming task!

See some guidance on how to act as a moredrator of Q&A.

What you get

For the moment, you just get a whole lot of love and appreciation for us, for so graciously helping out. We will also promote you to an Operator on IRC, so you have the rights to deal with situations.

As soon as you are accepted for the job of volunteer moderator, you should register your nick on Freenode.

Codes of conduct

Please read the WPD conduct guidelines to get a feel for what is acceptable and what isn’t, in terms of topics of questions and chat, and dealing with troublemakers.

We won’t check up on you too much; we’ll probably just look at the forums, IRC logs, etc. every so often to make sure things are being done.

FAQ

One role is going to be answering questions. A lot of these questions will be repeated over and over again. We are aiming to create an IRC bot that will pick up on common phrases and auto-generate replies, plus the IRC room topic provides links to URLs for FAQ, bug tracker, etc. Feel free to point people towards these resources or quite out of them, as you see fit.

The Q&A is soon to be improved, with categorization, etc., things will be more manageable there soon as well.

Leaving

If you don’t want to do this anymore, please tell us, and we won’t hate you. Anything you can do for us to help is really appreciated. Telling us helps us to look for other people to fill up the gaps.

Getting help

Chris Mills is the organizer of the volunteer moderators, so for any concerns or questions about this, feel free to contact him at cmills at w3 dot org. We may also set up a mailing list for this, but I’m not sure that’s necessary right now.

People currently on board as volunteer moderators