Not sure that there really is a good place for Minecraft questions on StackExchange. I find reddit.com/r/admincraft to be pretty good though.

Is there actually a place where you can see if the site has any upcoming changes, There is a weekly stackexchange podcast, that isn't that great, but that includes occasional announcements about changes and new features. Unfortunately, what you will probably learn from the podcast, is that stackoverflow is really main focus, followed by the careers service, and the rest of the sites seem to be a relatively low priority.

restoring the system to a known-good state ... is not a good solution in this case. - Why? The sysadmin could simply restore to a temporary location, and then compare directories. That would give you the same information you got from the find command in that stackoverflow answer you seemed to like.

I don't feel really strongly one way or the other. If the description has been good over 3 years then restore may be the better choice. I just really want to have a single tag.

I am pretty sure you can't @ someone in chat unless they have recently been in chat.