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frequently asked questions
Who is in charge here? Are there admins and moderators like other sites?
The moderators are: cortex, restless_nomad, taz, LobsterMitten, goodnewsfortheinsane, Eyebrows McGee, coder pb, and very occasionally vacapinta.
jessamyn and mathowie are retired.
The best way to reach a moderator is to use the contact form, which emails all of the mods. The site is staffed 24/7, and the contact form will reach whoever is on duty.
All the moderators are also regular site members, so you may see them around participating just like anyone else. When a moderator leaves an official moderation comment, the comment will appear [in small type, in square brackets]. You can confirm someone is a moderator by looking at their profile page. They'll have a "staff" badge under their profile picture. The "staff" badge also shows up next to their name on comments in the MetaTalk area of the site (if the person was a mod at the time of the comment; it does not show up on old comments from before the person became a mod).
Some history:
1999: MetaFilter was created by Matt Haughey (mathowie); he was the sole admin of the site for the first several years.
2005: Jessamyn West (jessamyn) was hired; she was especially instrumental in establishing the culture of the new subsite, AskMetafilter.
2006, May: Paul Bausch (pb), our technical wizard, joined to keep the back end running smoothly and do bugfixes and feature builds.
2007, March: Josh Millard (cortex) started helping out around the place.
2008, May: vacapinta became the unofficial "Midnight Mod", checking in a few times during the North American night.
2011, April: Jeremy Preacher (restless_nomad) came on, originally to keep an eye on things over the weekend, although gradually shifting to weekday hours too.
2011, October: taz joined the team as the first regular non-US mod, bringing civilization to the formerly-lawless hours of North American night.
2012, October: goodnewsfortheinsane and LobsterMitten joined the team as part-timers, with a few regular shifts and some flexible coverage for other mods' hours.
2014, May: Layoffs. Due to a budget crunch, jessamyn retired, and gnfti and LM were laid off. Over the next months, site members contributed enough money to keep the site operating and even bring back the laid-off mods at sharply reduced hours.
2015, March: Mathowie retired, still the owner but handing nearly all site operations over to cortex and the remaining mods. Cortex took over most operational stuff, and LobsterMitten took over mathowie's on-site mod hours.
2016, January: Eyebrows McGee joins the staff as a part-timer and often weekend mod.