This is a guest post by our team of moderators. Special thanks to Michael Rochlin, Alex C, Alex J, Nick Edwards, Haley Higgins, Dustin Goodman, Daniel Seymour, boring12345, Giacomo Sorbi and Jacob Andersen. If you see them in the forums, be sure to say hello!
As you may have noticed, there is a mysterious group of people who frequent the Q&A forums and have a little moderator badge next to their names. We would like to explain who these moderators are and what they do.
Back when Codecademy was still in its infancy — before PHP and even before jQuery — we realized that the Q&A forums needed to be managed. Someone needed to be responsible for making sure the community maintained a friendly and helpful atmosphere. Codecademy staff were busy building the amazing site you all know and love, so they reached out to the community for help. The most active, eager, and helpful Codecademics were tasked with making Codecademy even better than it already was, and this small group became “moderators.” The site has since grown, and so has the need for moderators. We are now 20 moderators strong and growing.
So what exactly does a moderator do?
As the name suggests, we moderate the forums. Knowledge-hungry learners post hundreds of new questions and answers every day. It is our job to create a friendly learning environment by removing spam posts and looking out for disruptive users, especially those who use profanity, insults or are just plain mean. We also try to make sure that people are not simply posting working code, because we believe in learning by doing; which is a process that usually involves trial and error. We also sometimes step in to correct people’s posts and show users how to format code snippets.
Moderators are here to provide extra help and answer people’s questions. (In fact, this is what we spend the most time doing.) Each moderator has proven that they can be helpful in answering people’s questions, and we all try our best to provide as much help as we can, to as many people as we can. When you see the “moderator” badge next to our names, you can rely upon that answer to be correct.
Additionally, we are in close contact with the Codecademy staff, especially the Community tag-team of Linda and Karen. We let them know what is going on from a user’s perspective, as well as point out issues that we have noticed across the site. We help to brainstorm on ideas for the future, discuss user reaction to recent changes, and try to provide insight into how Codecademics think.
We are users passionate about fostering Codecademy’s vivid community.
We find it rewarding to contribute and share our knowledge.
We enjoy helping fellow users learn how to code – and learning from them.
But most of all, we’re Codecademics just like you!
It's a popular hobby, practiced by people all over the world. At its most basic, it's a loop of string and two pointy sticks. The loops can be combined in various ways to create a wide variety of things. In other words, knitting is a lot like coding.
Today, we're introducing an updated interface that makes learning to build something easier than ever.