In the course of writing Proposed revision of the FAQ (on-topic) page, February 2017, I went through a lot of meta posts. After going through these things, I feel like this is long overdue...
Thank you goldPseudo!
It's clear that goldPseudo (diamond moderator since private beta) has played a key role in keeping this site's head above water since the start. Somehow he's managed to do this while patiently fending off repeated character attacks.
For perspective, here's an example of a closed StackExchange beta site: Startup Business (zip). It is now a lifeless zip file on some computer (and an attempt at reviving it at brightjourney.com is nevertheless dying a slow death).
From the Area 51 discussion page, we can see why Startup Business was closed:
The site was closed not because it lacked activity in general, but because the community that once started it had for the most part left, and wasn't being replaced with new people as folks found the site. People would come and ask a question, and we generally never saw them again. This left the tasks of actually caring for the site almost solely on the shoulders of the moderators, and there was no good way of fixing that. -- Tim Post, December 2013
And from meta.stackexchange:
If there's enough moderation for a public beta site to consistently remain free of spam, for flags to be cleared, and for our Be Nice policy to be upheld, your site will remain open. However, if community leaders drop off, flags sit without being addressed, and we can’t find any suitable volunteers to step forward, the site gets closed. -- Ana, June 2015
Whatever disagreements we might have, it's all going to be irrelevant if we end up closed and archived in Islam.zip.
