Is it okay to post, here on meta, a simple Thank You to our moderators?

Question

I would just like to write a very large "Thank you" to our moderators here, past and present. Things I've recently discovered on other sites across SE have brought into sharp focus the way U&L runs so smoothly.

I've been a forum addict since long before the days of Stackoverflow and I've always been aware how important good moderators are to a community. Without them forums of any kind (even Stack exchange ones) become cliquey, sour, and eventually die.

I think it's a great credit to all the moderators here, past and present, that U&L remains a largely healthy community where technical discussion (even debate sometimes) is encouraged. I wholly believe that they have been even handed, tolerant, polite, and above all respectful to the wishes of the community.

I know in the past I may have been [quite vocally] opposed to an occasional decision here. I now wholly regret not taking the opportunity at the time to express how well I believe our moderators are doing generally.

So yeah... Thanks!

Answer 1

Since this is a Q&A site, this calls for an answer, and since I’m not a moderator I don’t have the same qualms as terdon!

I think this is OK, and in fact fits quite well under

Meta is for Unix & Linux Stack Exchange users to communicate with each other about Unix & Linux Stack Exchange (asking questions about how the websites work, or about policies and community decisions)

It’s not “asking a question” as such but it is communicating.

(And thank you to the moderators, and to all the non-moderators who contribute to the general atmosphere here!)

Answer 2

From a general standpoint, I believe that whatever topic supported by the community has full rights to stand where it stands.

For the sole sake of niggling, I might suggest that it could eventually have found an even better place as an answer to the 2022: a year in moderation thread which just suggests the deserved thanks OP mentions but… not only, since it outlines the help from :

• "the non-moderators who contribute to the general atmosphere here!" as Stephen rightly added to the list,
• Some community-manager(s) that were directly involved at least twice, should'nt we be thankful to them as well ?

Let' niggle even more : I personally find hard to be thankful to abstractions and moderators is an abstraction. As schrodingerscatcuriosity wrote it in a comment, they are individual human beings and I find it more meaningful to thank them individually, therefore :

Many thanks Jeff Schaller, Kusalananda, slm and terdon.
Many thanks to anonymous_community-manager
Many thanks to Philip, Stephen and schrodingerscatcuriosity (list made that short only for staying… on topîc… ;-P)

Answer 3

I agree, unlike some other sites especially ServerFault which is completely unusable to me due to terrible moderation, excessive downvoting of questions that get upvoted here, closed topics due to off topic when asking about servers on serverfault, very narrow scope, and overall just very poorly run site:

This Unix stack site is actually helpful, useful, and actually get good help. I have never gotten any help on ServerFault and had to end up figuring it out myself or abandoning it. But thanks to this site I am able to get some help when I need it. I am not making money I run my own servers as a hobby and to gain experience, and don't have a dedicated DevOps team nor the funding to hire one, and plus I am trying to myself learn, so having this place to come to ask questions while I learn is really helpful.

So to answer your question, yes, you can thank the moderators because they are doing something right that ServerFault has utterly failed at and after 10 years I give up on ServerFault and have deleted my account multiple times because I gave up over there.

So I don't know what they are doing different here but I am grateful for a good community here to support my hobby and learning.