A few days back, I left the moderator team at Stack Overflow. No worry, it is simply a personal decision that is more a matter of common sense than weariness of the Stack Exchange network.

I have been elected on Cross Validated in 2011 and I have been very active between 2010 and 2012, although I soon had to stop almost all my contributing activities as a user to fulfill my role as moderator–at that time, it became quite difficult to spend 3 to 5 hours a day answering questions and managing the site together with my other colleagues, especially since I was also contributing to SO and tex.SE at the same time. Then we had a pretty funny time with a crazy guy, afterwards I had to reduce my overall activity to focus on my paid work and to manage several life events. Overall, this is one of my best memories on internet, thanks to many serious, benevolent and qualified users, and especially one of the moderators who taught me a lot, in terms of applied statistics and statistical computing, and with whom I have enjoyed working together to maintain a vibrant community. If he reads this post he will certainly recognize himself.

It was a pretty tough decision to make but you have to face it: I hadn’t participated for 4 years and since my accident I don’t have much motivation for all these interactions on the internet anymore. I still consult Cross Validated from time to time, but I must admit I generally read answers from specific users that I was already following beforehand. I am quite happy about how the site works, even though I haven’t followed every detail in a long time. Surely, one of the hardest part of this community has always resolved around the necessary but sometimes delicate distinction between questions that are purely related to statistical software, numerical computing issues, or even applied mathematics. Anyway, I believe a good job was done by the moderators and the community in suggesting what topics are a good fit for the site.

For the record, here are all my posts (10.2 Mb tarball) on the main site. I described in an earlier post the why and how of that archive. I haven’t checked if the imgur links are still valid, but at least the plain text version should be enough to get the idea.