Since HopelessN00b wants to have this discussion in public, I will oblige.
I was on the site today because we got a few different emails this past week about it. One was Chris S, stepping down as a moderator - I'll let him talk about that if he wishes to; moderators are volunteers, and are of course free to step down at any time. The rest were complaints about actions taken by HopelessN00b. This is also not particularly unusual; we get complaints daily about moderators on all sites. Usually I spend a few minutes checking out the situation, a few minutes more explaining it, and everyone goes on with their lives.
Instead, I found this:
(actually I was looking at a different page that displays the last 500 comments, but the gist is the same: a wall of identical comment, posted in groups, each a few seconds to a few minutes apart)
This is a bit worrying, but not entirely unusual - moderators or regular users engaged in a big cleanup campaign often have histories of repetitive actions. So I dug a bit deeper - starting with the links in the comments themselves, then in recent meta activity. Nowhere did I find any hint of a massive question cleanup campaign. Now I'm getting a bit worried, especially since these closures (and comments) are still appearing while I'm researching. I checked chat - both the public rooms associated with Server Fault, and the private moderator room. Nowhere was there any discussion of this, save for a lone message from Hopeless in a nearly-abandoned chatroom noting that he had been "closing webpanel questions by the hundreds".
At this point, I'd already spent an unexpected amount of time on this, and from the look of things I'd be spending a lot more. And closed questions were still piling up; as a final sanity-check, I reviewed a sampling of them - some were obviously questions about administration panels, but this wasn't consistent; the majority of those I checked made no mention of such tools.
##Handling a rogue moderator
When a normal member of the site starts making massive, controversial changes without prior discussion, the standard procedure is to immediately suspend the account in order to stop the bleeding, then discuss the matter. But suspending a moderator doesn't accomplish much. So the remaining option is to remove moderator status, and then attempt to discuss whatever is going on - if the situation can be resolved quickly, this need not be a permanent change in status; if the situation goes south, suspension is then an option.
So I removed Hopeless's moderator status and sent him a message requesting that he explain the situation (the other Server Fault moderators were also copied on this message).
I've yet to receive a response.
Thus far, I've identified 572 questions closed with some variation on that comment over the past 2 months. The average score was 0.1, the maximum score was 19. The comment was replied to 29 times; Hopeless responded to 1 of them. These questions will need to be reviewed; Michael has started a separate discussion that will help determine the criteria which should be applied to them.
##Update 4/10/2015
After being asked to post this publicly, I finally got a response privately last night. It did not attempt to answer the one question I asked.
I'll be going through server logs this weekend to attempt to determine what was actually being done here.
So in summary, if you are a community moderator on a Stack Exchange site, here’s what to expect:
- As a moderator, your actions now represent the community, so you will be held to a higher standard of behavior. You are an ambassador of trust, with the same sorts of rights that the official development team and community coordinators have.
That trust has been betrayed. I am extremely disappointed in how this situation has played out. I will be working directly with the remaining moderators to ensure that this community's standards are being upheld and communicated effectively, and that any damage is repaired.