I'm really sorry to see you go. It's difficult for me to envision the office without you.

I'm also sorry that you feel the way you do about the proposed procedures. They're still open for feedback, we've got the condensed text versions to clear up some ambiguities in the charts ready to go out today, and more feedback is being incorporated to add clarity.

There will always have to be a system where we, in an emergency, can pull a lever to remove a moderator's access immediately. If they violate their moderator agreement, get into public "brawls" with other moderators, have their accounts compromised or a running script go haywire - we have to revoke access immediately. Our privacy policy mandates it.

But, the new policy automatically kicks in the discovery phase where 2 CMs are assigned to look into everything going on and render a decision. There's a phase where we, if we have very confidential information that was communicated in trust by a user to senior management (and this has happened, where someone wasn't comfortable with the CMs knowing their sexual orientation, gender, religion, or other personal things) can step in and halt the process, or require a precondition to be met prior to reinstatement, but it would always be communicated to the mod, and would be extremely rare. There are some former moderators that just can not, under any circumstances receive access again. We can't build a policy for the next 10 years in a vacuum.

I hate how everything happened too. I've been literally sick about it for the last few weeks, but it is also a very rare anomaly when it comes to moderation here. It is very rare that a moderator is asked to step down for reasons other than vanishing.

I wish you luck in everything you do and we really need to make time to get that burger and beer - but I didn't want you leaving thinking we were done with things, and I need to get our side of why things are written the way they are out there.

Thanks for your service George. We're going to miss you.