Do moderators communicate amongst themselves?

Question

I have no specific reason for asking this, just curious. Do the forum moderators communicate with each other to discuss a question or an answer or whether to close or whatever?

Answer 1

That's a fair question, and one I sometimes wondered about too before becoming a moderator.

Generally speaking, if something might require an internal discussion, then we'll bring it up in our moderator chat room. If it might impact the community however, then we'll discuss it here on the Meta site so it's visible to everyone.

There's usually more internal discussions after moderators are elected, but at this point, we've each been moderating long enough that we're pretty much on the same page and understand each other's decisions, so most times that's not really necessary.

In regards to whether something's on-topic or needs improvement, we often take cues from the community, like comments asking for clarifications, close votes, and flags. So your participation in helping to moderate the community really does make a difference, and we encourage everyone to do so (in a friendly and welcoming way of course).

Answer 2

There are several special ways that moderators communitate with each other and with other Stack Exchange moderators and staff:

• A Webmaster moderators only chat room - It is the main way that we Webmasters moderators communicate internally and Dan's answer explains how we use it.
• An all Stack Exchange moderators chat room called "The Teachers Lounge" - I typically participate there only if somebody pings the Webmasters moderators about whether or not some particular question would be appropriate to move to Webmasters.
• A Stack Overflow "teams" Q&A site for all Stack Exchange moderators We can ask and answer questions about moderating.
• A (monthly?) Stack Exchange moderator email newsletter.
• Notifications to Webmasters moderators about new Webmasters meta questions.
• Notifications to moderators if a user is contacted by another moderator - we all get to see what was sent and handle any replies.
• Notifications to moderators about announcements on the main Stack Exchange meta site.
• Moderators have the ability to view the email addresses of any user on the site - I have occasionally contacted other moderators directly this way when they haven't been active for a while and I don't think they are seeing notifications.