@AndrewSchulman good one, I updated the first verbage.

@Shog9 thanks, so when can the community expect a post mortem?

@Shog9 I like the way their page looks, I will probably post another meta question as a proposal to change our own page to be something similar but more sysadmin-ey.

@Shog9 In some examples the OP has clearly defined a question, but showed lack of research, this is the most common example I see, I can provide examples if needed. I will take a look at SO's how to ask page and provide more feedback.

For some reason, when I saw the headline Abrupt change in modertator staff I immediately thought of you, not only b/c of your frank candor, but because you are one of very few active mods on the site, dare I say the most active mod on the site, which helped clean the site up. If I don't see you on SF, see you in the new comms.

+1 for slack. I also feel like but maybe there's a way for the site to thrive, as naive as it may be, I missed the golden age of SF, and I'd like to see it again. We tried last year, by being doing more Q/As of our day to day operations, and posting questions and answers of our own problems we solved during the day, and I believe it paid off to some extent, I for one have seen a slight increase in SCCM questions on the site, and (among other things) I feel it's because of the effort I (and possibly others) put into adding our own conquerings to the site.

I agree with Mike, we only get x amount of close votes for the day, and it takes 5 from us to knock a question out. In comparison, even if we assume .1% of collateral damage from this (hypothetical figure) that's 5 legitimate questions, and over 500 questions that needed closing which would require 2500 community votes (assuming no mods voted), and if we assume a voting core of 100 users, then it could be done over 5 days assuming something similar to full time work. that's unrealistic, in comparison, it took n00b 2 months to accomplish by himself, so it's likely it would have taken us longer.

James, can I ask how you found out about this? It doesn't appear you've been here before, I'm glad you're here fwiw, just curious.

Take an hour and read through, it's quite a read ;) Seriously though, no one but them knows what happened last night, but n00b eventually replied privately (and also posted his answer above), I can't type the rest cuz it's too long :)

I understand. It seems from @Shog9's comments on his own answer above that he thought n00b might have been using grep'ing the site and autoclosing based on the appearance of the name of some web panels, which may or may not be true. Looking at his screen shot I don't see that, there were only a few questions that were within a minute of each other, and I can certainly read questions as fast as they were closed up there, there were no more than 2 questions closed per minute in his screenshot, certainly doable if you ask me.

the majority of those I checked made no mention of such tools. Can we have a list of those questions? I've seen 5 from AndrewB, but are there more?

Finally, understand that this was nothing new for a portion of the core community. We are trying to restore SF to what it was, n00b helped a great deal with that, we didn't care how he closed questions, we knew he was closing them, we trusted they were off topic, and if 1 or 2 got caught in the crosshairs that's what a flag for reopen or meta is for. If the OP of the question didn't take that step, then why should we go making a thing out of it? rhetorical question.

If they noticed and did nothing, it's a silent approval, and their actions should be called into question as well. In addition, this meta thing is a two way street. Yes, n00b could have posted an additional meta post to say he was explicitly closing webpanel questions. Nothing stops anyone from posting to meta to find out why their question was closed, or to find out if we have a rogue mod on the loose. I think the latter would have gathered the community's opinion on how it felt about the mass cleanup that was taking place.

I feel that if someone is going to oversee something they should take a minute to actually be involved in that thing, if they are not going to trust the opinion of the people that oversee that thing from day to day. Also, it does not appear that anyone complained (at least from the core community) outside of the people who's questions were closed. I could be wrong about that, but if there was anyone who complained, I haven't read it in this meta post. n00b stated he has been doing this for 2 months, so either no other mods noticed, no other mods cared, or both.

Next, there is the disconnect between the CMs and SF in general, not all but a good portion of them are not active in the chat or on main, so some of us feel that they wouldn't know how we want things done in the community. The fact that they swoop in when there is the threat of a rogue mod is fine, however they have a pretty good consensus here from the people who actually use and frequent the site that we requested this, so to assume the worst of a person who was voted in by the community who has interacted with the person before they were a mod is kind of insulting, at least to me.

It's a little deeper than that James. The problem is/was the fact that the community attempted to inform the CMs that we in fact requested these moves by n00b, both implicitly when we elected him as mod, and explicitly when he told us what he was doing in various chat rooms and meta posts.