It's not technically possible to have more than one moderator of a thread, or to apply additional posting restrictions to the thread, or to prevent posts from counting in that thread, unless I create a new section for it.
I'm sure any voting would end up picking a decent candidate that would be in touch with thread culture, and if that person believes s/he needs help in the thread, s/he can elicit such help - even though it seems that there may be some inability to give actual powers to anyone beyond the owner of the thread, unless the owner of the thread shared his/her log-in credentials or a administrative "fake" account was created for such persons and the password only known by the elected moderator(s).
I am not sure if there should be concerns about getting stuck with a tyrant, because we would be voting for the person, but if there is a feeling to allow for a continued quasi-democratic process, we may want to agree to 1 year terms or something reasonable like that.
... a succession plan is a worthwhile thought. Perhaps it could be TheDreadPirateRoberts model where the current mod chooses his successor and simply hands over the WO admin account keys to the next DreadPirateRoberts when they are over it?
In fact it would be kind of cool if the WO admin had an account name like DreadPirateRoberts or variant ...
... but what should we call the monkey then?I don't really disagree with the idea - but a problem in a quasi-anonymous forum is that an actual appointment process might not be as fair as just having either a periodic vote (such as every year) or just having theymos reassign the thread under his own discretion. I imagine that Theymos is only flexible so long as we seem to be working matters out - but as soon as our decentralized bullshit turns into a bunch of in-fighting that resembles the scaling debate, then he probably experiences less healthy inclinations to capital punish the whole situation within the discretion of ownership.
By the way, Marcus, I thought that at one point your name was in the running?.. or maybe at some point you bowed out? It seemed at one point, someone made the argument that anyone who had started a competing WO thread had implicitly expressed interest in moderating the original WO thread?