To be clear, the intent was not to be sneaky. And it wasn't even particularly sneaky in practice. It was more sneaky than the proposed alternative of going to a great deal more effort to compose personal /msgs to each individual janitor.

jeffa says he visited the site several times and so he was several times presented with a notice in the janitors' nodelet that updates had been made to that wiki and he chose to ignore these. The policy change was announced in the official document for dealing with internal janitors' policy. Every janitor got notice of a change to this document every time they loaded at page at PerlMonks. A private message does not necessarily provide any more indication of its presense than that.

In chatter, you seemed shocked that none of the janitors had searched jeffa's home node to see if his e-mail was advertised there and then sent a notice to jeffa in e-mail. I'm not sure what precident leads you to think that such is expected behavior. It is extremely rare for me to use e-mail to monks, and I only ever resort to that when the message is something impractical to send via /msg (and even then, e-mail is often not my choice).

In hindsight, there are tons of different ways this could have been done. I don't think any of them would have completely avoided hurt feelings. It is extremely difficult to remove a privilege without hurt feelings. I prefer to hurt feelings by not granting the privilege to begin with.

Why cut somebody from doing a service to the community they ardently wish to do, but keeping others that just happened to be logged in at some point within an arbitrary timeframe, and were able to express a "me too"? (which "me too" is only to illustrate, not that I think any of the janitors lack merit).

You present a false dilemma. Why should I prevent someone from doing a service to the community that they proclaimed that they wanted to do in demonstration of their attention to official site methods for internal policy issues in favor of granting access to someone who visited the site but repeatedly put off taking notice of janitorial issues to be discussed?

On a personal note, tye, that back-patting "thank you" to jeffa comes across really as very disrespectful. I wonder if it really is. What's really up?

You really should avoid trying to infer emotion from text-only communications. What is really up is that you have invented some emotional content for my words that is completely off target. So far off target that I'm at a loss for much of what to say in response.

Perhaps the biggest mistake was a great underestimation of how entitled people had come to feel about this privilege. I think going forward that we'll push a "I serve at the pleasure of the presidents" mantra. The vast majority of cabal members did very little to gain membership and yet several appear to think that what was given so easily mustn't be taken away. It was not taken away as easily as it was given.

I'll repeat that I regret that so many hurt feelings have resulted. I'm sure some will find my statement of this to be a slap in the face. I can't prevent that so I'll just settle for knowing that I mean that sincerely.

I'll also note that I acknowledge some specific mistakes were made that will be avoided in future. The "when" and "how long" will be more carefully considered in future. How the results are communicated and how those impacted are likely to feel will be considered more carefully. I hope that the prequalification of new members will be done much more carefully, noting that membership is a privilege that can be taken away for relatively little reason if deemed necessary by agreement of a majority of the gods, or something.

But, for future reference, if one gets removed from a privileged group and hopes to get reinstated, then I suggest that one of the worst approaches will be to start by publicly raising a stink about how you were removed and then send ultimatums. And for those reasons, this particular ship has sailed, as far as I am concerned.