Alright, I thought I said this before, but I'll rehash it and hopefully make it clearer. When I announced I was opening moderator applications and inviting people to send PMs to my inbox, I never intended to appoint a mod. The entire administration team (which means Binary, Rammite, and me) were in consensus that we didn't feel that the moderation team needed to be expanded further, and the application process was simply to see if we had any immediately useful additions onto the team that we wanted to make. After reviewing the applications, we decided that we didn't have any. More recently, we decided as a group that it was perhaps time to expand the moderation team in light of recent events. I can't and won't speak for Binary or Rammite, but my reasoning behind an election was to allow more community input into the team, which was one of the requests from a while back. There were concerns about it being a "popularity contest", but the general sentiment was that as opposed to other elections for other positions that had happened before, the moderator election would be taken more seriously and not made into a popularity contest, especially with the restrictions that were placed on it. In addition, we added the caveat that we could veto elected candidates in order to insert some quality control and make sure that only people who we thought had a reasonable chance of performing the job well would be able to take the job. Obviously this will be an imperfect process - the intention was that you all could help us find better possible moderators than we could by ourselves, since we were unable to identify any gems in our own search. This requires a bit of trust in the fact that you all will be able to do so, and we've retained the ability to moderate the process as necessary. However, we're open to input in refining the process or changing it entirely, and we are definitely discussing and making changes as necessary. Well I am not, because you didn't answer my question yet; why are you a mod in the first place? You just were there out of nowhere and every administrational act you've done since then has been a fuckup. Just get a fancy guy-who-pays-the-bills user title and give the admin position to anyone who actually cares for this forum. In order, then: I became a mod because ian appointed me so in recognition of my technical abilities, and I was able to use that power to more effectively manage the forum. I didn't actually become an administrator until the transition to IPB. But that's all old history and I'm wondering why you're asking since you were definitely around for that. I understand that you may not understand what goes on behind-the-scenes in running a forum, but please don't try to handwave it into "paying the bills." On the contrary, this forum ONLY runs because I get enough donations from you guys to support it, and if it doesn't, the entire forum collapses because I can't support it with my nonexistent income. And then you act like I'm the only one around here running things. Well, Binary and Rammite don't have those shiny titles for nothing, and in fact they do more of the hard work of managing the community than I do. Most, if not all, of my actions in recent months have either been purely on the backend or as a result of deliberation with both Binary and Rammite. Very few decisions lately have occurred without them pushing. But if I'm REALLY such a terrible admin that this entire forum thinks I'm absolutely out to destroy it with all of the decisions I've made, please forward your complaints to Binary and Rammite. If they both agree with you all that I'm unfit to run this forum in any capacity, I'm happy to step down and hand off everything to those two. It's not as if running a forum is that difficult technically, and Binary is more than qualified to do so. I'm not aware of any such forums existing anymore... the only ones that are "hidden" from public view are contributor forums, administration forums, the Saloon, and SPUFurb, to my knowledge. Even I don't have access to the latter two, though Binary and Rammite certainly do. If there are any others that I'm not aware of, please feel free to PM me so that we can resolve this.