The elephant you dragged in is completely relevant. The interests of the management team and board of directors of Stack Exchange are the bottom line, and any moderator who wishes to be elected is only doing their (unpaid, volunteer) work at the pleasure of the overlords.

The funny thing is, in the absence of a great amount of context or a banner saying they're exceptions, most canonical questions are off-topic.

"sometimes contributes"

Meta up/downvotes don't affect reputation, they're only used as a method for agreement or disagreement.

@kasperd I don't think it would be a bother to anyone. Heck, feel free to use the Comms Room even (link on the right side). The only notification ends up in the user's inbox, it's not like we're all blasted with every line of the chat rooms.

@kasperd If that's the case, just mention them in a chat room with an @ tag

@shanemadden It is this controversial, and frankly the actions taken here today by the Stack Exchange team have been abhorrent. If the wishes of the community are to be treated this way, then so be it. It's your site, but I for one want no part of it.

@Shog9 I'm honestly shocked that such a comment would be the official stance of Stack Exchange. This is deeply disturbing. When did it become personal?

@JonEricson: We could have either closed or migrated the grep one. Does U&L want a 6 year old accepted question? The 5 year old QMail/Kloxo one definitely falls into the panel category, as well as being "insufficient info". The PHP/APC one should have been migrated to SO, though do they want 4 year old answered questions about aging/unsupported software? The DirectAdmin one is an issue with a Panel-modified VPS that the user barely knew how to operate, and was also 3 years old. The last one is a very poorly written question that devolved into asking how to configure a VPS panel 3 years ago.