PhysicsOverflow was always intended to be a high-level physics analog of MathOverflow and an open peer-review system, offering a good professional atmosphere to support academic discussions. Right from the start it has always been very clear to me, that the definite moderators in charge have to be in the real-world physics community established and trusted professionals, as it has been the case on the former Theoretical Physics SE site for example.
I never thought that moderation on PhysicsOverflow should be particularly my business in the first place, at least not in the long run. After setting up the site and going public, it some kind of accidentally sticked with me and Dimension10 (who does in my opinion a good job). Even after mailing explicitly to some physics professors who have been active on the site or are listed in the nomination thread, none of them had time to help us with moderation. What I always enjoyed and still like is welcoming new members to PhysicsOverflow, helping them register or solving other administrative technical issues to relieve and support Polarkernel such that he can spend time for developing our platform.
In the context of the bad mistakes I did in the past, because I then honestly misunderstood/misinterpreted our off-topic rule, it is therefore rather natural for me to now announce that
I will officially resign by April or May, when there will hopefully be someone to replace me(Clarification from Jia Yiyang after Dilaton's consent: the resignation is unambiguous, independent of whether or not a replacement can be found by the time.)
@Ron: I have to admit that the last few weeks I have been very VERY VERY angry and upset about you, because your recent Meta activities gave me a hell of a bad time and I seriously felt persecuted, hunted, harassed, and turned into an unperson personally. So the draft of this announcement I started yesterday, looked rather different than what I am writing now. I hope that you and everybody else will see now, that the very negative assumptions about my character and person discussed recently are really not true and I acknowledge that my silence (I did not dare to post anymore!) probably contributed to these discussions. If these things become settled, I ask you to hide or edit these comments misrepresenting my character and person. In the near future I will hopefully be changing my academic position a bit and I fear that otherwise, if certain people are able to establish the connection between these comments and my real-world person, it will largely damage my real-world life and career.
@Vladimir I admit that sometimes you have been successfully able to drive me up the wall. But of course I should not have edited your comments out and apologize for this to you.
In the near future I will have to face some real-world issues that may keep me rather busy offline. Also, since about a year my health is no longer what it used to be, and it was again negatively affected by the for me emotionally very straining and stressful recent happenings on PhysicsOverflow. So I will probably have to reduce my activity on the site to recover and sort out some real-world business. I already stopped doing moderation (apart from dealing with obvious spam); I have never done much of it anyway.
I hope that we can now all work together to save revive PhysicsOverflow and make it the success and helpful support for the international physics community it is meant to be.
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