Thank you, mxyzplk: appreciation thread for long time mod

Question

Jon Ericson let slip that mxy will be handing in the diamond badge now that the election is over.

FWIW, this is the RPG.SE first post by mxyzplk:

And the first meta post I could find: (But apparently, there is an earlier one)

The Pro Tem mod nomination. August of 2010.

The first four Pro Tem mods were announced Sept 7, 2010: Mxyzplk, RS Conley, C Ross, Bryant (and it seems Pat Ludwig and Ace Calhoun). .

Thank you

That's a lot of time, a lot of flags, and a lot of "how do we do this better?" discussions on meta, for a pay scale of 0 dollars per hour.

Tips cap

Answer 1

Copied over from the other thread:

Thanks, mxyzplk, for serving as a mod!

I may never have remembered how to spell your username without looking it up, but I did appreciate the hard work put into the site by you, SevenSidedDie, nitsua60, and doppelgreener (you 4 have been the RPG.SE mods since I joined the site). Half the mod team being changed feels like a big deal. Hope you stick around the site and keep making it a better place!

Answer 2

Thanks y’all! Sorry, I had planned a bit more overlap with the new mods and then to do an announcement, but looks like I’m sans diamond already.

I’ve been a mod on RPG.SE for more than 8 years, and have seen the site from beta to present day. It’s been a wild ride at times, and at other times pretty calm as everyone focuses on the point of the site, Q&A to learn how to play and run RPGs better.

I’ve been into RPGs since 1982 with Star Frontiers and then D&D. Besides a brief break in college and a year or two thereafter, I’ve been playing and running games, through the game explosion in the late 1990s, through basic/1e through every edition to 5e and Pathfinder, and through the indie game explosion this decade. I still game weekly. RPGs have spurred me to research history, make long time friend groups, and prepared me to be a better manager and parent. It’s one of the best hobbies there is!

I’ve also gone through a lot of RPG communities, from Usenet newsgroups in the early days to forum sites living and dead.

I love RPG.SE because it’s far and away the highest signal to noise source with the most mutually respectful conduct of any online gaming community I’ve been a part of.

Curating that was a challenge for each generation of mods, and we made mistakes over time. But we learned from those mistakes, and have tried to empower the community with doing the vast majority of “mod” work, build consensus on Meta, and be adamant about what acceptable conduct consists of. We also learned not to “fight the format”, and not try to use the stack for things that don’t fit the usual Q&A rules. As a result we have a healthy and growing stack with many experts in about everything.

We still have issues - Good Subjective waxes and wanes, but recently the community’s been stepping up there too. So I figured it was best to step away while things were going well.

Diamonds are forever, so diamond mods can always return by contacting SE central; maybe I will one day. But 8 years is a pretty long stretch and a break is welcome. I have confidence not just in the mods but the community that is making this a great and unique place for gamers.

Special thanks to all my fellow mods over the years and best wishes to our two new ones. I will make sure to occasionally rustle your jimmies to keep you on your game.

Answer 3

The amount of great work you have done for this site is truly EPIC level (With a helluva lot better rules!;-)! You're one of the main reasons rpg.stackexchange is the top RPG Q&A site! You put the diamond in diamond moderator (Okay that was lame, but it's true :-). I hope that all that you have done for this site touches your heart with satisfaction.

Thank you.