:-(

Phew!

By the way, I tried to write a "canonical" answer for the "What's the form of the possessive suffix?" questions we get.

One that we can close others as a duplicate of.

Or, if nothing else, use as a reference.

Moderators can see deleted comments at any time.

They can also see who deleted them.

Once in a while, someone on Japanese.SE asks me who deleted their comments, but the site doesn't show any comments having ever been posted. In those cases, I assume the comments never actually went through due to some kind of network problem.

But that doesn't happen very often.

That particular user has a pattern of doing that, unfortunately.

I see. You could start a meta post if you're really curious.

Well, I shouldn't speculate too much, but I think there might be a legitimate reason the moderators might have wanted to delete that comment thread. I'm not privy to that information, of course.

So I'd just keep that in mind and try not to stress over it too much.

The official word on comments says:

> Comments are temporary "Post-It" notes left on a question or answer. You should not expect them to be around forever: once a clarification has been made, an edit added to the post to include new information, or the issue in the comment is otherwise resolved, it is subject to deletion. In reality, many obsolete or chatty comments remain untouched due to the high volume of comments posted, but this does not mean that they can't or shouldn't be deleted in the future.

ELL uses comments in a way the site wasn't really designed for – to ask and answer additional questions, to discuss various things, to argue, or just to chat

We've kind of gotten used to expecting a lot of our comments to hang around forever . . .

I didn't notice the typo

I can understand that

Yes, I think so :-)

Maybe we could turn all those comments into some sort of answer . . .

One thing no one has mentioned is the prescriptive grammar rule against using so without a correlative that-clause.

Although so has been an intensifier for a thousand years, some people would say that using so this way is restricted to informal style due to that prescriptive rule.

And so the sentence might not necessarily be acceptable in all situations.

They did mention it. Although it's not really an intensifier in the correlative so . . . that construction.

Intensifiers don't license the that-clause.

So it should actually be distinguished from that construction rather than considered an example of it.

Yeah, private beta goes crazy :-)

You can see our low point on the Japanese.SE graph around July 2013.

That's when we got the fewest questions per day.

The site sort of hit a lull after about a year

It's actually very common for activity to taper off at first on SE betas, 'cause not everyone who commits to the beta sticks around forever.

But then there's usually a slow build upward.

I became a moderator in 2013.

It's almost 2016, so soon I'll have been a moderator for three years! :-)

Happy join-day!

I joined ELL just after the public beta started, so I missed out on the initial private beta rush.

At the time, flooding was destroying my floor, so I went to stay with my brother for about a week, and posting a bunch on ELL gave me something to do :-)

(By "flooding" I mean a pipe broke!)

Nah, nothing crazy like the floods in Thailand!

You know how sometimes people say things like "my basement's flooded"?

That sort of thing.

Except it was actually the kitchen.

Oh, a bit.

They replaced the whole floor.

I was renting, so it wasn't my floor.

Too little

Yeah. It was my floor. Just not my my :-)

Sure.

John Cowan once wrote:

> The trick is, rather than cultivating the desire to be right, to cultivate the desire to become right and remain so. That way, when you find out that you were wrong, instead of being crushed, you are elated because you were wrong but have now become right.

Isn't that neat? :-)

Neat!

And hi!

It is 16 C here. I think it is pretty awesome.