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!

Hello fellow Codecademics!

As you may have noticed, there is a mysterious group of people who frequent the Q&A forums and have a little 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.

Here are a few (unofficial) stats about us:

• Number: 19 moderators plus Linda, Karen, Eric and Codecademy staff
• Countries of residence: USA, UK, Belgium, China, Germany, Israel, Italy, Kenya
• Languages spoken: Chinese, Dutch, American English, Texan English British English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish
• Ages: in range(15,99)
• Programming Experience: Novice to expert

In sum:

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!

A few years ago, it was tough to create a professional-looking website without designing and coding something from scratch. There were free templates and website builders, sure, but the results from most were less than professional. Not exactly how you want to represent yourself or your work to the world.

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Fields_Bio

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Pablo_C

KALO_cafe

Visual Grid Photography

Mitchell

Triangle

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Here are some of their recent additions to the Featured section:

Chikin and Fish

Polly Pearce

To Have and To Hire

Irfan Cheema Photography

Jim Kamoosi

Christina Jimin Lee

Music Three Sixty

Rossi and Blake

VIA

Marina di Nisida

IM-Creator is among the best website creators on the market right now, and definitely worth checking out for your next project, whether it’s a personal site or for a client.

Have you tried IM-Creator? Do you plan to?

[Disclaimer: This post is a sponsored review, the opinions expressed in the article are the author's only.]

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