@Zoredache I do not know. The experts seem not to be repelled by the other SE sites front pages. Maybe the experts would not even look at the front page in the first place but use customized views or an RSS reader so the looks of the front page would not matter to them. Should I just go over to Meta.SO and ask?

I think I can see the rationale behind focusing on "professionals" to ensure high-quality questions. So the current effort to narrow down the "professionals" group is the direct result of the very failure of a wider group of "professionals" to produce high-quality questions?

@MadHatter If things are missing in the toolchain, there should be a way to help that. Either by asking the SE devs or by hitting the API directly. As for the reason why the Usenet is dead, it is surely not because it has been drowned in posts, it is quite the opposite: as it is anything but a low-threshold medium by today's standards, it has been simply dried off due to the lack of new users. So we should not just dismiss any lessons learned there but take a second look - I am quite confident the Server Fault community could benefit from a lot of that.

Let us just put the regex in there instead. It should be coupled with an admission test presenting the user with 10 choices and the task to find the two which are not covered by the regex. Only after providing the correct solution should new users be able to post to the site.

There are "accomplishments" in other communities. They seem not to help the problem.

Also, this is a problem which nobody else would be able to fix for you - as the barrier is individual (and even constantly changing), everybody needs to fix it for himself.

@MDMarra it is not about reducing the contribution, it is about focusing it. I believe there is little value in having a high-profile AD admin spend his or her time with reading and closing or migrating irrelevant questions about Ubuntu Linux. The time likely would be much better spent if these questions were filtered out of this user's view. "stop whining" is not meant as a call to shut up but to build individual barriers.

@SvW The election page says "moderator positions available: 2". So with Iain throwing in the sponge, this would amount to one surplus position.

Has this been sighted again since? If not, it might just have been a one-time event - possibly due to some data loss at imgur.

I strongly disagree with the idea of bothering the mods with things which the community can handle all by itself. Mods are meant to be "human exception handlers" and have enough flags to handle as it is.

Should we have the "misanthropist" badge for edits resulting in downvotes and un-accepting as a counterweight then?

@slhk I was not able to find anything specifically mentioning this corner case. But his posts on editing like Asking Better Questions seem to be breathing the "anything [...] that’s salvageable, edit it" spirit. I am inclined to stick to that as I could think of a bunch of good reasons to do so.

@voretaq7 the reason I asked to deny the migration was simply to make sure we do not dump questions which we would consider "SPAM" onto others. Also, this can easily be turned into a sysadmin-related question by saying "I am a sysadmin with a handful of Outlook Mac users who will be getting bootcamped to Windows at short notice and need their local mail archives converted"-

Thanks for the insights. Yet I think that salvaging the question and leaving it on site would have been the preferable approach in this case. Of course I am strongly biased as it was my effort which is now in a deleted answer, but as I understood Jeff Atwoods posts on Meta.SO editing / salvaging should be preferred over deletion wherever possible.