I never said anything about malice, @Håkan. More than enough trouble caused by apparent carelessness or boredom though. As for my last sentence... Plenty of folks here saying I'm doing this for one reason or another, with no evidence to back that up and my own statements to the contrary - I see no reason to grant any credibility to such nonsense, even if doing so might be politically expedient.

I call it as I see it, @Katherine; I've no ill-will toward any of you, but I'm not coming in here blind either. I do what I can to support y'all when asked, but ultimately what happens here - good or bad - is up to you.

Being open about what you're doing is pretty critical to being a moderator, @ewwhite. I spent entirely too much time this past week piecing together information that should've already been public; if he decides he wants to be a moderator again, we still need to have a long talk about that.

I don't care if Hopeless is a jerk or a clown, @Katherine; as far as I'm concerned, we're all jackasses. The important thing is that we find ways of making this work in spite of personality conflicts.

I stand by what I wrote last week, @HåkanLindqvist. You can argue my tone should've been better; that's a fair criticism. But through all of this I've been as forthcoming as possible: I've reported the facts, the conclusions I've drawn and how I arrived at those conclusions. When you're telling someone else's story, it is crucial to differentiate between your interpretation of their motivations and what they've actually admitted; anything else is simply dishonest.

what browser and OS?

For the record, @Katherine, I'd forgotten about the election spiel until folks started bringing it up last week; folks say a lot of crazy hyperbolic stuff during elections, what matters is what they do afterwards.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

The only connection is the one you noted in your previous comment, @Reaces: as user-moderators are removed or remove themselves, there has to be something to replace them. And yes, I'm lumping together several separate activities here, but while editing and closing and voting and deletion are quite different actions, the goal for each is in some way to improve the contents of the site; these "meta-activities" require an ever-growing number of participants to be effective, regardless of which specific actions they focus on.

Please understand, @Mad - I'm not trying to win some rhetorical argument here. I've seen which communities function and which ones fail, within the context of this particular system - all I'm suggesting is that this one has been trying the same strategies for as long as I've known it, with the same results; if you're not happy with those results, then perhaps it's time to learn from the examples of the others. Whether this community lives or dies remains to be seen - but there's an awful lot of hand-wringing about it, yet seemingly an unwillingness to try something different.

@Mad, I've been doing this for a lot of years. I'm not telling you these things because I'm passionate about them; I'm telling you because I've watched the same sad little play a hundred times and it always ends the same way: the old die out from exhaustion and are replaced, their efforts come to naught. If you don't believe it, then ignore me; the evidence is right in front of you whenever you're willing to see it.

Maybe now you can understand what Shane was talking about WRT needing new contributors, @Reaces.

The one I noted. That holding back rubbish is something to be encouraged, that discouraging it is counter-productive to improving the site. If you want to turn this into a battle between Defenders of the Realm and Crap-lovers, then you're blind to what's been happening here. How many people need to beat their brains out on the same stone wall before y'all start walking around it? It doesn't matter how many questions you shut down, how many people you drive away; there are countless more where they came from. You can either learn to handle them efficiently, or waste the last of your energy.

I've heard this claim repeatedly, and reject it outright. Unless this is your first time on the Internet, you know well that this isn't a battle to be won; it's an ongoing task, part and parcel of being a part of a public website. There is no holding back this sea; it is bigger than all of us. We can channel it, rise above it... or be crushed by it.

Perception isn't necessarily reality, @BigHomie. Everyone hates it when their requests go unanswered, but even as we grow the dev team it's impossible to address more than a fraction of the requests on any site. I still have years'-old requests that haven't been addressed yet. Some requests are easier than others; take advantage of the ones that are possible now.

Ah, see - no one believes me when I say that, @Katherine... But it's sooo so true. When I was young, I used to go out & pick up trash along the highway; you do that by yourself, you'll be out there all day with nothing to show for it, but you get five people lined up & you'll have miles behind you before you know it. When everyone does a little, together it all adds up.

I wish I'd used a more empathetic tone as well, @EEAA - but I don't think it would've gone down any differently. I've been here once or twice before. Regardless, nothing I wrote last week had any time for proof-reading much less editing for tone; I suspect this is one of those situations where the only way I could be prepared to handle it well is to have previously handled it poorly. Hope for next time, I guess.