New Moderator, Sorta

Hi.

I've re-promoted AnnaMolly to moderator. Obviously, some of you are going to have some questions, which means this is going to be a longer and heavier HEY GUYZ NEW MOD post than usual.

We needed another Moderator? Why didn't you put out the call for applications?

Chaos and Aly are very busy RL right now, and being a solo Moderator is a lousy assignment, so I wanted to give Ack someone to work with. We had an excellent pile of applications from before still sitting around, and Anna just missed the cut last time, for reasons I'll get into shortly, so we elected to just re-promote him.

Wasn't there a bunch of drama with him getting fired before?!

There was! One of the first things I did after my original promotion to Moderator was look into it, because the whole thing had felt a little strange. The end conclusion of all that wasn't some nefarious plot or unconscionable behavior on anyone's part; there were a couple of dubious actions that got game-of-telephoned into something much, much bigger, and spiraled out of control for all involved. All of the tertiary stuff about abuse of power? There was no evidence of that in the logs, and I've enhanced the moderator logging significantly, both for the protection of users (so I know if mods are up to no good) and moderators (so I can look at logs and say definitively that no, they did not abuse their power).

You know some people are going to be mad about this, right?

Sure, I get that. However - if you're mad about this, I'd like to ask you this favor: trust me. I've had him on staff for a couple of months now doing QA work and being my eyes and ears for things like threads going out of control, Niko editing the rules node, etc. I have complete faith that he cares about the site, and won't do anything to jeopardize it or cause problems (beyond the usual sorts of problems that pop up when people get moderated and don't like it). In short, I trust him, so if you can't, then trust me. But give him a chance! He grows on you with time, like a barnacle.

Do you expect this thread to become a total fiasco?

Of course I do! The temptation to just lock it from the start was pretty tempting, I will admit. However, I firmly believe in transparency and feedback, so I'm leaving it open with the following caveat: if you show up just to start drama, I will remove you with a quickness. It's okay to have questions; popping in just to cause problems is not, and that's not any different than any other thread in that regard.

So with all of that, you still choose to do this? I thought you were smarter than that.

Your mistake for thinking that in the first place. Anyway, as I said - I think he's very capable of doing this job, he was almost re-promoted before, and for those of you who didn't like his moderatorship the last time, you can always hope that he's learned something in the interim. He has been an invaluable help to me as I go through and repair/update large sections of the site, so I'm rewarding him with an even more terrible job. As for potential drama, if people have a problem, they can always come to me directly. My inbox is always open.

As always, thank you for supporting the site.