After 15 Years, a ServerFault Moderator Steps Down as Site Traffic Collapses
Calling It Quits on ServerFault
A moderator elected in ServerFault's first community election in 2011 is quitting after over 15 years. The site now gets just 2-3 questions a day, down from its 2011-2012 peak. He describes how cross-cultural escalation norms once sparked flame wars, and how recent StackExchange-wide spam campaigns forced him to spend evenings manually banning spammers in real time.
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.