2016 Moderator Election

Hi, I am Miroslav, Bulgarian living in Germany. I love road trips and panorama views. I have been Travel.SE member for almost 4 years and in this time I have done a lot of reviews and tried to help to the moderation of the site with all privileges that I have so far. I am pretty satisfied with the current moderator team and I hope that I will do my job also that good.

Hi all,

I believe that this is a really nice place to quench travel hungry people even if they are not travelling as often as they wanted.

I am a programmer and I have travelled extensively with various means and under various circumstances. I believe in kindness and most of all, respect.

I would like to be a moderator, because this will make me spend more time here, I feel that people in this portal understand me and I understand them!

Thanks and safe travels!

I'm nominating myself, to see what my candidate score is...ok I jest ;)

I am however, a previous mod who took a break, and a current mod on expats.SE. I hope to create a bond between Expats and Travel.

I've been on since the first beta week in 2010. I love travel, and have accessed Travel.SE from at least 20 countries. I've met several of the top users on this site in person, and feel like part of a community, rather than just a name on a site.

Stats: I've answered over 1630 questions on the site. I've 'impacted' over 6 mill people, have >1,500 helpful flags, and have cast over 11,000 votes.

And...I have two Travel.SE tshirts, two mugs, stickers, and of course, the Travel.SE towel ;)

To know how I'd moderate:

• My thoughts on moderating and the community on Travel.SE

• Rule 1: Be nice!

I'm in Sydney - while I previously moderated from Asia and Vancouver.

I look forward to a 4th mod to help the present ones, and to continue to grow this site not just as a Q/A site, but as a real community, meeting people in person as we all enjoy the thing we come here for - travel.

Do I have as much reputation as some of the other candidates? Maybe not.

However, I have experience in moderation and I believe that in many ways a fresh perspective can be helpful.

In my role as moderator on the Law Beta site, I am reasonably active. Moderators on Beta sites take on a slightly different role to those on graduated sites, but the principle that moderators are human exception handlers remains the same. Looking at some of the current issues raised on Travel Meta, I confidently say that my flag handling is accurate, generally uncontroversial, and prompt.

What can I bring to Travel? Well, since my breakout answer a little over three years ago, my contributions have been infrequent, but generally of a high quality.

If elected, I will work closely with the community to uphold existing norms while being open to potential improvements. I realise that I need to put in the time getting to know the community and I'll do so regardless of the outcome.

A bit about me:

• I live in Sydney (I believe this would help with the distribution of moderators across timezones)
• I've travelled in Asia, Europe, and North America
• My favourite invention is the sleeping mask

I would like too nominate myself as I believe I have been very understanding and helpful to fellow members during my stay in this stack exchange site. I always believe that discussion, understanding and kindness is the way forward. Of course i understand that I am quite a newbie, but still, I would be willing to take this chance to help with this community.

Why do I happen to have lower rep?

Me having a lower reputation is more due to the fact that few questions have been asked about places that I have traveled to, than being inactive. I have answered most questions that have been asked about my native country, even older questions.

Does lower rep mean less experience in moderation?

Not really. I have a good knowledge on editing, flagging posts and also commenting. Of course, there will be more to learn, and I will need to devote more time on Travel.SE.

So I have 0/40 and I think I am the perfect moderator?

Absolutely not. I understand I can improve i several areas such as voting. I vote very regularly on stack-overflow and I just need to bring this habit to Travel.SE. I probably need to answer more general travel questions as well, as well as moderating posts.

I have been a travel.SE user for some time. I did not plan to stick around, yet I am still answering questions when I can.

I believe in a hands-off moderation style. I think the platform offers many tools for regular users to take care of the site themselves. There are exceptions requiring swift action, like the spam waves we see from time to time, but for the most part content issues can be dealt with in the open, using the voting system.

I have also been a Wikipedia editor and administrator for many years and perhaps because of this I believe in editing questions and answers aggressively. I also have a tendency to comment a lot. If I become a moderator, I expect that I will need to be a bit more careful with those two things.

I am nominating myself for the following reasons:

• In order to have a primary phase (without my nomination it's only 10 candidates).
• To know my candidate score.
• To be on the top of the list before Mark Mayo, Relaxed & JoErNanO.

What I can contribute as a moderator:

• I have a very thick skin, it's not easy to piss me off.
• I am unbiased, I love everybody the same except Mark Mayo whom I like more than the rest but I don't think he'll be a problem.
• I visit SE Travel everyday.

Long term extensive traveler and a fairly early member of travel.stackexchange.com, I'm more interested in questions related to locations around the globe as opposed to the many visa/passport/Shengen questions that have more recently taken a much more prominent position.

I would hope to be able to facilitate going somewhat more back to what I think should be the roots of this community, travel advice related to locations around the world.

About myself

I've been a Travel.SE member for over 2 years now, made 400+ edits, posted 500+ comments, reviewed 300+ posts, cast 400+ closure and reopen votes, reached ~175k people. I have a pretty good grip on what makes a good Travel.SE question and answer, as well as what direction the community is heading.

Time-zone availability

I live in Prague, Czech Republic and would be available during 08:00-23:00 UTC time.

Main goal as moderator

I think the community moderation is perfect as it is, so I'm not looking to do anything else other than reduce the workload of the current team.

I like helping other people with reasonable queries and with moderation I'd have more tools to remove the unreasonable queries as well :)

About Me

I have been around Travel.SE for more than a year. During this time I became a trusted user, posted many answers, a few questions, and reached some 627k people doing so. I have edited over 850 posts, raised hundreds of helpful flags, completed thousands of review tasks, and distributed a fair share of reputation by voting over 5000 times. I'm also an active Meta and chat user, and have interacted closely with the existing moderators.

I love travelling, although I've slowed down over the past couple of years, and have been trying to pass on my knowledge and experience to others by contributing to this site. Indeed, I like to think of myself as a tips-and-tricks guy.

My Objectives

The reason I spend so much time on Travel.SE is that by participating here I'm always learning something new. My goal as a moderator is to make sure this site stays this way for all its users. Maintaining high quality standards is paramount to achieve this goal. As a moderator I'll ensure that site rules are adhered to by all including myself. I'll also strive to judiciously and promptly clean up low quality content.

My time zone is UTC+1.