Dear KH Community,

For those of you unaware we have been running a moderation election over the last few days and have selected our new mods which are as follows:

KH1 Mod Votes:

Desa3579 RebelWatt SwiftSRL

KH2 Mod votes:

InsertLogicT BigSid119 CrystalCrown13

These are people that you not us have chosen to be mods and this is our first time trying something like this. As promised I'm posting this thread as a place to vent about the election process and how we can improve it for next time.

The nomination phase:

Originally I wanted people to write me a big manifesto of what they wanted to accomplish along with them posting how much community experience they had. In hindsight I probably should have stuck with my guts here rather than try to streamline the process. My decision was made partly due to the lack of moderators due to the mass exodus and wanting to speed the process up but honestly that isn't a good reason and in future i'll be demanding manifestos unless there is an outcry not to do this.

When I came up with this process I was actually going to be a lot more strict with it asking for top 10% of runners. This caused a bit of a stir causing me to lower it to 25% of runners which was still contested by the existing mods leading it to be 33%. The argument with the moderators was that a person who is a good runner isn't necessarily a good moderator. Do you guys believe that the 33% threshold was too low or was it not enough?

In regards to the controversial decision with the kh1mod and kh2 mod post requirement I believed that anyone applying for a moderator should take it seriously. For those of you who have been around when I ask for KH moderators in the past will know that I have done this several times before. It is a small simple thing but I believe that if a person can't follow the rules in applying for a moderator position they likely won't be follow the rules exactly when it comes to verifying runs. I get this time it caught out some popular candidates but I'm hoping these people learn from this and aim to do better next time.

Election Phase:

Honestly I felt this went rather smoothly. However in the future I will be doing this phase via a google document, we felt that making the votes public would prevent people from saying I faked the results or that I was rigging it behind the scenes as such we had the votes open to the public. However this also meant that people were self conscious in who they were voting for and being able to see who was winning skewing results. I am hoping that people trust me to do this in the future but again let me know if this is a poor decision.

Thanks again for entertaining me with this idea and thank you again for being involved.

• Drazerk

Zan and I were talking about the mod requirements a few days ago, but what we agreed on is that instead of having to be top 33% in the most popular category, the person should be top 33% in a category with 10 or more people (and also has to have ran two other non-artbitrary categories). Not all popular categories are fun to play, and there are definitely runners who in my eyes who qualify to be a mod, such as Zan for DDD, but because they don't run the category with the most runners they get shafted? I don't think that's fair. If they are skilled in a category with a good amount of runners, that should be good enough imo, it shouldn't have to be in the most popular category.

Congratulations to everyone who won. I believe all of them will do an incredible job moderating their respective games.

The primary issue I had with the election process was that it genuinely comes down to a popularity contest of who has the larger friend group. This issue could have been slightly mitigated by limiting people to only voting for one person instead of three. Either way it only matters if the newer mods fix previous issues so we'll see how much this election mattered in the coming weeks.

I agree both with Daj and Violin, but I think the biggest difference would have been in your original idea of asking them to write their stance on an interest in being a leaderboard mod.

What Daj said, but that is an issue with any kind of election like this. I saw a ton of names I’ve never seen before come out of the woodwork to nominate themselves and inflate their friend’s numbers. It’s not really an issue as long as whoever ends up winning is trustworthy and all that, but it’s just a general pitfall of any elections. I think it was a good process overall, just a few kinks to work out for the next time.

I hope all the new mods do good by all the games, I’m excited to see what comes of it.

Seconding Daj, Hyper, and Timmi here. I am not very happy that all 3 of the new KH2 mods came from the same "circle" of people within the community. From what I saw they are the most prominent runners right now and just tweeted out the election and a ton of people voted for those 3 because of it. That's not to say they won't do a good job, and that they didn't win fairly in a democratic election, but as Daj said, it came down to a popularity contest. I agree that in the future people should only be allowed one vote to hopefully mitigate this and give other people a fighting chance.

Also, as Hyper said, I would like to see each person up for election release a statement on why they think they would be a good leaderboard mod and what their qualifications are and ability to commit time to it. This would give people nominating and voting a better idea of who they are voting for and would hopefully help people choose the best person for the job instead of just voting for their friends/popular people/people they've heard of.

I also think there needs to be some brainstorming on how to mitigate the amount of people voting who are not allowed to vote. Not really sure how to do this personally and obviously this time we needed to get new mods in place so this made the most sense, but from what I heard, the number of people who either can't read, chose not to read, or just don't care, was staggering.

All that being said, I think this was a relatively successful first go around at this process. I wish all the new mods the best of luck and hopefully we can all continue to improve on this in the future.

I'm also agreeing with Daj, Hyper, Timmi and Spoon here. I believe that you should have stuck with your idea of releasing a statement with a plan for what they wanted to do as a mod. It would have let the communities see what types of plan they were voting for instead of a name. Perhaps that would have changed the way that someone would have voted.

Another thing is giving people multiple votes. I think this was a weird choice and am curious to know the reasoning behind it. I believe that limiting the vote to one in the future will give you a better result. If a person has to think about where their vote is going instead of being given three, it might have made for more interesting race.

Also, for the nominating phase, I believe the has to have run 2 run in different categories was also an interesting choice. I understand why it was made, but I believe that it might be worth removing in the future. These are just my opinions, but not everyone is going to want to put up runs of other categories but may still know a lot about them. For example, someone might just be focused in getting a really good time in a specific category and then move on to the next one after they've reached that goal. To check if they'd be right for mod, you could ask for what they know about other categories, and how they would help someone looking for help in those categories. If they give a sufficient enough answer, then they should be looked at for a mod. Not everyone is interested in running every category and I don't think that running a whole bunch of different categories necessarily means someone will be a better mod. This restriction might have also kept back people who were interested in being mod and had some interesting ideas from being considered or even entering. Again, this is just my opinion and I do understand the reasoning behind the choice made here by the mods.

All in all though, I think these elections were very well handled. Good job to everyone involved.

In regards of the multiple votes thing I'll be honest I hate FPTP with a fiery passion and wanted to do STV, however the fact I did the voting on SRC limited how I could achieve this hence I want to move to google forms in order to do an election via STV.

In general I know A lot of our audience are probably not familiar with systems other than FPTP so I'll probably have to find some guides on how STV works to teach people as there was already mistakes with this one. But the multiple vote thing definitely won't be a thing again.

I'm also looking into possibly doing blind manifesto based voting next time but it will be hard to police it so I'm not sure how to go about it really.

I would be in favour of requiring candidates in the future to provide manifestos, as this would allow us to gain a better insight into candidates' moderation intentions, and would provide a better way to judge potential mods rather than it running like a popularity contest.

However, I do not feel that blind voting on manifestos would be preferable, since I feel that a candidate's previous work within the community can provide a valid reason to vote for them. For example, both RebelWatt and CrystalCrown13 have had previous moderation experience prior to these elections, and this may have provided some with a reason to vote for them.

I strongly agree that STV or some form of ranked voting should be used over FPTP for any future elections.

Finally, I'd like to say that I feel these elections have been handled very well, especially given that this is a first attempt. Huge thanks to Draz and the rest of the mods for setting this up, and congratulations to all the new mods.