See, I know this seems like a big issue that kinda involves everyone but when you really think about the whole thing, its kinda just more an internal staff matter. Let me just explain the situation as it is now, or at least as it is on face value. A moderator was removed from the staff, there were reasons for their removal and those reasons were valid, another moderator volunteered to leave due to a personal relationship with the previous moderator.
Everything was fine for a few days then the first moderator who left decided to try and rile people up, talked to many of the current staff team and posted several threads in the public in order to kinda rile people up. The Current staff were upset at first, but after the situation was explained, all the facts revealed and so forth, most of the staff (or at least all I've seen and know about) believed that moderators removal to be justified. With all the reasoning as to why things happened the way they happened to explain most moderators, I believe, are now OK with how things have been handled, maybe they could have been handled a little better but given all the variables involved it probably was justified (I could be wrong about this). So really, in terms of the staff side, this problem has mostly been resolved with only a few lingering issues.
Really, when you think about this, this is just staff drama. Drama inevitably happens in any site, emotions can get flared and so forth, but it happens and the main thing really, I think, is to move on from this.
Is there anyway to make drama less likely to happen? It's kinda hard to say, we are reworking some of the ways the staff team handle staff related issues, but in terms of the actual staff-user reaction this kinda thing has very little to do with that. Staff are still moderating as they normally do (it's christmas so many people are away atm), everyone knows what's up and we do have some future interesting things we want to propose to the community (but we haven't fleshed out the details yet so we just gonna wait until that's all figured out).
This isn't the first time something like this has happened, and no matter what we do this probably won't be the last, drama is inevitable especially when you're on a site run by volunteers
. But, you can know that in terms of the staff team themselves the drama has basically been resolved.