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Comment by klmr | Hacker News Reader

> That's not true for moderators: they have specific tasks they must complete, and they must continue to be active, or they lose their moderation status.

That’s not correct: especially on the small sites, it’s acceptable for moderators to be inactive for long periods of time. It’s not great, but it’s understood that moderators have lives, and that they’re … not employees. I can state this confidently because I used to be a moderator on smaller sites, and I finally resigned from one (without having been in any way encouraged to) after almost a year of inactivity.

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The official limit is no activity for 6 months, at that point the moderator status is supposed to be removed. This has been enforced rather inconsistently at times.

Interesting, thanks for the correction. … if I ever knew this I forgot it.

But does that mean that the moderator can just take one action every six months and retain their status?

You couldn't do that in a job!

You can absolutely do that in some very specific kinds of jobs, I've seen it first hand in public offices.

What kind of job? The person who prepares and files my taxes will retain their status as "my" CPA basically forever, but they only do my taxes once per year.

> especially on the small sites, it’s acceptable for moderators to be inactive for long periods of time

Interesting!

I can see that being a case against the original point then: if moderators really are free to work or not work however they'd like, then that seems to suggest that they don't match this test, and they're nothing like employees at all.

Do you have to turn up enough to keep up with the moderation queue on those small sites though? If there were a whole bunch of flags waiting on a small site for a while, and as a moderator you weren't helping out, would you lose your moderator status there?

That’s exactly what happened, and no, I didn’t lose my status. There are internal metrics for showing individual moderators’ activity but — at least while I was a moderator —these were purely FYI, and not used to enforce activity. I eventually resigned because I was aware that my inactivity was causing backlog that created more work for other moderators. I don’t remember exactly what happened next but since moderators are elected yearly by the community I suspect that new elections were held. However, I need to emphasise that I was relatively inactive for more than a year, and completely inactive for many months.

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