Vi and Vim's second moderator election has come to a close, the votes have been tallied and the two new moderators are:
They'll be joining the existing crew shortly—please thank them for volunteering, and share your assistance and advice with them as they learn the ropes!
For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.
Huzzah! Welcome to your new position of janitor ..eh.. I mean moderator lads.
Let me take this opportunity to ramble a bit:
I resigned as a moderator mainly because I hadn't been very active for a while due to the normal drift in interests that people have, and felt I was merely "holding on" to my mod status; it would be better if an actually active member would take it. Ben and Filipe were the two people I had in mind for this.
I actually emailed Ben before resigning to make sure at least one person would be willing to run for moderator (backroom dealings ... I should go in to politics). I thought it would be weird to email two people and Ben had been active for longer, but would have emailed Filipe if Ben had said no.
My resignation notice was rather brief because I felt if I didn't post it now I was never going to. I had already written it twice in the six months prior, but never actually posted it. Being a moderator on a tiny SE site isn't really all that meaningful, but I had spent a lot of time here and there was a certain degree of emotional attachment 😅
It's been over five years since the site launched; in the early days there was a lot of uncertainty whether the site would be allowed to launch in the first place. A previous attempt was shot down by Jeff a few years prior, and several employees were skeptical of this attempt too. To quote: "I still think this proposal is a waste of time and effort" [..] I'm going to be looking for questions that can't be asked on other sites".
I felt Jon's arguments were actually pretty solid and made me doubt as well, but still continued of course. We spent a lot of time thinking of questions which would be off-topics on Stack Overflow in the first month or two, leading to some rather ... contrived questions. SE eventually turned around and here we are.
Five years later, it's clear – to me at least – that this site adds a lot of value to Stack Overflow. Many answers are significantly more in-depth and the people here are genuinely helpful, non-judgemental, and generally just pleasant to interact with. There are no pointless comments and arguments about the Right Way™ or that You're Doing It Wrong or any of that nonsense.
Unclear or poor questions are closed, but no is made to feel stupid with not-quite-insulting-but-not-very-nice-either commentary. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who posted a question here and got such a negative experience that they'd never like to come back. It's been years since I saw any negative interaction here, making this site a refreshing change from Stack Overflow, /r/vim, and some other places.
I'd argue that this site is the best place to ask your Vim question on the internet – something we can all be a little bit proud of – and I'm sure Ben and Filipe will ensure that status is maintained.
Welcome to the team Ben and Filipe, that's a real good news for me not to be the only mod anymore. Even if the work load has not been huge it is always better for the community to have several people sharing the mods power and I'm glad these new people are two active, respectful and knowledgeable members of our community.
I will not be as eloquent as Martin because I'm better with shell commands than with actual sentences but I do agree with him on all his points. Especially on the fact that this community is really as inclusive as technically accurate and that we can all be proud of that.
So Ben and Filipe enjoy your new diamond and make sure our community stays as great as it is today :)
