and Skinner has recently said they are thinking about changing that (cutting the numbers for the big forums). They just did a big change to the alerting system the other day. Before, alerts in whatever group or forum you are hosting showed up as a PM. Now you have to go into the host forum and click a link to see them. Trying to get hosts to actually go there and participate in discussion and therefore reduce the number of locks by hosts that aren't trying to get consensus.

welcome back!

It requires a bit of strategy though. I don't mind giving it away since I accidentally did it. (I was originally host #2 after SfP.) If I had not busted term-limit, I'd have timed out two weeks ago when he did. I'm also not going to serve this full term. I view it as a bug to be fixed rather than an exploit that people should be using to abuse the hosting system.

If you resign and immediately add yourself back to wait-list when there's nobody else on it, the wait-time before it makes you a host again is <1 day. Thus it is possible to serve 89 days, resign, wait-list and be reappointed 1 calendar day later perpetually as some sort of permanent host. It might be immediate even...I was on vacation when I did it and wasn't paying attention. I resigned and put myself on the wait-list with 3 people ahead of me on Dec. 23 figuring I'd get back to hosting in late Jan. at the earliest. When I came back Jan. 10, I was host with 17 days expired.

I'm sure they're aware of it by now.