It's time to be done after just over 15 years of moderator work. I was elected in the very first community election in January and February of 2011, and by now I'm quite possibly in the top five for longest serving community moderators on the original trilogy sites of StackOverflow, ServerFault, and SuperUser. I could check, but I'm not motivated. SF has always been the one I worked with and for. 15 years, and I've learned so much about moderation and online technical communities.

The early years of ServerFault were vastly more fractious than the site has been in the last 10, and taught me so much. One particularly vivid example was seeing the toxic reverberations between users from different countries and how they handle escalation of conflict. A particularly volatile mix were the Russian speakers and the folk from the United Kingdom (this was before Brexit), where the very British snide (a plus-one or two escalation from just asking questions, the next step was ad hominem attacks) was taken as an invitation to fight by the Russian speakers (whose plus-one escalation typically was ad hominem attacks, which means the brits saw this as escalation and moved on to flame war), both of which deeply and horribly offended US-based users for whom both were plus-two or plus-three escalations, definitely not a plus one. These flame wars proved the need for moderator coverage during US night time, which has been a factor in every election after mine. It also drove the feature to lock posts to get folk to cool down.

However, the site has been in decline for a long time. The peak for question asking was in 2011-2012, with a change to Google algorithms in 2013 causing a sizable drop in traffic in late 2013 to 2014. The long slow decline started in 2016, and in recent months we're getting 2-3 questions a day. The moderator flag queue mostly is dealing with spam. Even the Suggested Edit queue, once a great place to farm reputation by fixing other's grammar and formatting mistakes, has slowed down enough that two people can keep it from getting clogged.

The biggest moderator thing I was involved in the last few years were StackExchange-wide spam campaigns that also targeted ServerFault. Manual remediation was required until StackExchange could figure out technical fixes, and it was a bad 12 months there. SuperUser got it way worse than we did, but our downvote and site traffic numbers have clear spikes 2x and 3x above our baseline traffic during the spam surges. There were a few months in there where I spent my evenings watching the new-user creations and spam-banning and deleting in real time. The new technical measures have made that sort of coordinated spam campaign much harder to execute, and is working.

We haven't had a major debate about policy on ServerFault in a long, long time. StackExchange as a whole regularly has major debates, but ServerFault in specific hasn't.

In the last few months the Suggested Edit queue has been barely active, which is the signal that it's time. I'm out as of the end of the year. It's now up to the community to decide if it's worth replacing me.