You're volunteers and you're doing this of your own free will, @Sven. We've built extremely powerful tools for y'all to use in service to the community here... Tools that can do a great deal of damage if abused. You're free to not use them, but if you do then you should expect - heck, you should demand - some amount of oversight. This is the second time in two months I've had to clean up after reckless, uninformed use of these tools with no attempt made to communicate with the public or even with the rest of the mod team. I was very polite the first time, but this isn't a PR problem anymore.

You're assuming he was actually doing what he said he was doing, @joeqwerty. I'm not at all convinced this is true, and he's been pretty cagey about it. Regardless, the rest of the mod team is reviewing the closed posts and I'm reviewing access logs; one way or another, we'll know the truth eventually.

You might be right about the question being unclear. I'm honestly still scrambling to figure out what was being done here, so I don't yet know what questions I should be asking. One way or another though, I'm going to find out by what criteria these questions were being identified, and by what mechanism they were being closed. The answers to those questions may well raise other questions. I really would've appreciated a frank, factual explanation from Hopeless himself a day ago, but it's increasingly clear that I'm not going to get that.

Partial quote, @BigHomie? Go on, read the rest. Acting as you believe the community wishes you to? Great! Acting as you wish and misrepresenting what you're actually doing to make it look like you're just enforcing the rules? Not great.

meta.serverfault.com/contact @mfinni - or just post here on meta, of course.

I asked you a simple question, which you have yet to answer: why were you closing questions en masse with a canned comment that doesn't explain the closure. Getting on your high horse about the problems with web-admin questions is nice rhetoric, but that isn't the problem here: no one gave you a mandate to sweep the site clean of questions that you personally felt were tainted, notify the askers with a canned comment, and then ignore replies. You were trusted with powerful tools to serve the community, and expected to be open and honest about how you use them.

You avoided answering my question yesterday and you are straight-up lying here. I'm done trying to protect you.

Determining topicality via grep isn't controversial here, @EEAA? Ooookay. In that case, I can solve all of your moderation problems in 5 minutes - just give me a list of keywords and we can all go home.

If you want to do this publicly, that's your call @Hopeless. Regardless of where we hold this discussion, I still expect an answer.

Not that it's relevant @TheCleaner, but this is trivial to implement if y'all wanna decide on what the pop-ups should contain. Michael requested suggestions ages ago but near as I can tell no one took him up on the offer.

I'm waiting for a response from the person responsible. Hopefully, we can work this out without a ton of drama. For now, just know that removal of mod privileges is the moderator equivalent of suspension - an expedient way of halting a problematic situation until it can be resolved.

One of them decided to step down, and asked for his moderator status to be removed. The other decided something else and didn't ask anyone anything. I'll leave it to them to go into more detail if they wish to do so.