@Reaces That cpanel questions are long deleted since the latest great purging. And their behavior shows clear signs that they are very ready to exterminate a considerable part of the site, again. Well, maybe their behavior won't change only because of my disagreement, but anyways it needs to be documented that a disagreement at least existed.

@FalconMomot I edited my answer.

@Reaces It is okay, thanks.

@Zoredache ...and only a step from this if mods wouldn't be elected, but it would be a privilege by reputation. But I don't think it would be useful, because I don't think there wouldn't be enough mods around.

Afaik most of their questions would be ontopic on Security and also on SU. But if they are ontopic here, they won't be moved there. If not... well, it is a longer question.

@yagmoth555 Mods are exception handlers, they should be needed only in exceptional cases. I wouldn't say a disappeared OP exceptional.

@Reaces I think statistics could be relatively easily constructed from the previous elections. For example, if we would compare the logarithmic mean of the reputation of the winners to all candidates. (Ok, it would only show, that there is a correlation, but not that it is the most important.)

As I know, the primary correlation for the winners of an election is the reputation. Most people are voting for the candidates with high reputation.

@Fabby Well, it is risky :-) It is better to double-check.

@yagmoth555 But I don't think it would be a tipical case. What is much more common, is that the OP is long forgotten, but new and new answers are only coming and coming to the question, because the question comes always for in the "unanswered" list.

@yagmoth555 I think their problem with it that the mod would "say" something in the name of the OP. Nobody likes to communicate in others' name. But, I think, in such cases it would be highly useful if a highly upvoted answer could get an automatic green pipe.

@MichaelHampton Such questions could be closed (as crap) or migrated to Unix / SU. There was a "historical" tag, or they could have been locked as well.