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The tag thing is tangentially-related, @bighomie, in that the question cleanup should've been done before those were removed. But this wasn't directly related to that, and I'm somewhat hesitant to lump in questions that were closed or deleted as part of that - as I said above, that sort of large-scale activity is expected, and thankfully it was reasonably well documented here. [edit: ok, actually looks like this was a lot more related to the tag cleanup than I realized, and wasn't very well documented. I'll post my full analysis soon; need to have another look at this. ]
(And yeah, some will be dups of "how to analyze a log file for x" - still beats having to pick a custom close reason. Oh, that reminds me... I need to figure out what's wrong with the dup-suggester.)
The big problem on SO wasn't so much lack of research, but lack of research that contributed to understanding the problem. If the question is trivially answerable without any additional research, then it should be a duplicate for a mature site - hence our efforts over the past year to make dup-closing faster and easier.
It's 24 votes per day, @kasperd. Maybe you're thinking of 20 reviews? This is structured such that you can participate in review (using between 0 and 20 votes there) and still moderate other questions. Note that all of this is malleable if there's good reason (such as 1000 old questions that need to be closed in response to the result of some community decision).
This is the most complete list of closed questions I have right now, @BigHomie; it goes back to late December. Most of the early ones seem pretty cut-and-dried off-topic - I suspect those were part of the tag cleanups prior to the tag-merges. Later questions have a lot more Kloxo and CentOS stuff, mixed with... not sure yet. Some of the mods have been going through this a bit more carefully.
Just to be clear, @Scott, I have/had three separate problems to deal with here: (1) an uncommunicative (but active) moderator, (2) an unknown quantity of bad data due to #1, and (3) a big pile of meta drama. One is already dealt with, albeit not in the way I'd hoped. The second I'm dealing with. The last one I probably won't be able to handle effectively until the first two are squared away. The bit everyone's getting hung up on is #2 - and that's where I'm getting irritated, because it's trivial to observe that it exists, but hard to determine the reason or extent. But, we'll get there.
I use "specialized tools" all the time, @Michael. Some of the other mods have entire libraries of scripts they use to help them. Used judiciously, that isn't a problem. Remember this? Specialized tool. It ain't the tooling, it's how you use it - notice how folks who disagreed with what I did there were able to both find out what was going on and offer feedback, because I talked about it in public? Y'all didn't have to ask Shane to pull logs to figure out what Shog was up to, you just went to meta.
Read this answer, @Reaces. It describes what I have been doing, what I will be doing, and why I've been doing it. Ignore the comments - they're for the benefit of a handful of people who already know how this went down but aren't letting on in order to prolong the drama here for their own amusement. I sincerely apologize for the disruption - if I'd been watching more closely two months ago, I might've identified this sooner and been able to resolve it before it gathered steam.
If it helps, @Reaces, I was originally hoping to resolve this in < 30 minutes via a private conversation. Instead, this got dragged into public and I've done my best since then to keep up with it without intentionally spreading misinformation - even as I was (and still am) lacking a complete picture myself. I've handled hundreds of similar situations in the past, but this one takes the cake - I have a lot of work left to do here before I can be sure I'm being accurate, so the best I can tell you right now is what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Which, incidentally, is all I ask of mods.
No one thinks too hard about tags until something bad happens and you need to decide if it's worth pulling backups, @Sven. Not the first time a moderator screwed that up; I guess it's time we took a hard look at those tools & ask whether anyone should have access to them.
That was my concern a day ago, @Sven (hence the prompt de-modding). After digging into this for a while, I believe it was merely a collection of keyword searches combined with some specialized tools. We'll continue researching this.
I'm trying to find out what was actually being done, @Scott. Either there was an honest mistake, made repeatedly in a short period of time with no attempt at correction... Or something else. My operating assumption is that this was just carelessness, but - and this is important - I'm not a forensics examiner and this isn't a crime scene. The fundamental problem here was and continues to be a lack of communication, which is the only reason I have to be involved here in the first place - unlike criminal suspects, moderators are obliged to be candid as to what they're doing and why.
