TL;DR: Just read the question title.
I am with a deep feeling that this community is very unwelcome in SE and that trying to save it and make it work is fruitless.
The moderators came and tried to fix it in a single act. The result was a disaster.
Fix it? Who said it was broken? A now deleted comment from Emrakul said that if the community didn't change it would be closed. So either someone at StackExchange said it was in very bad shape for some reason and that the moderators should immediately act or none of the moderators actually understand what they really should do in order to fix it. For me at least, everything seemed to be fine before that day, our greatest problem was seeming to be disagreement about spoilers, how ingenuous1!
After a lot of debate, flamewars, rants, swearing, name-calling, frustration, aggressions and a rain of bullets on our own feet, I came to the conclusion that no matter what we will try, we will always fail, because there is simply no way to make this site work as expected from StackExchange staff (whatever is what they in fact expect). This site is "just a joke" as said by Shog9. A very unwelcome joke.
People were posting questions and answers. Voting them (either up or down) and the community is growing (at least was until December 2nd) and everything seems to be going in good shape afterall, with just minor problems. But in fact, nothing of that really matters. For me, it looks like that StackExchange considers this community as a pile of useless junk. It is only a big joke.
We can flood The Green Llama chatroom with a million of ideas and debates about how to solve our problems. We might post a thousand of questions and answers on meta about that. We may try to define and redefine a lot of scoping/rules/guidelines/whatever hundreds of times. IT IS ALL IN VAIN. Nothing will ever change the fact that this community is unwelcome in StackExchange.
We are fighting and struggling between us, with mutual aggressions and accusations (a.k.a "acrimony"). But all of that is for nothing. I am starting to create some conspiracy theories in my mind that this was in fact planned.
I am very sad. I saw people ragequitting the community today and I am seriously considering to do the same (or could I just be doing it right now maybe?)2. We already shot our own feet long enough. In fact, every shot that we do to any direction will always come back to land on our own feet. There seems to be nothing that we can do about that.
Emrakul said that we are in good health:
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In short, site health is up dramatically. To me, it's clear that we're okay with challenges, and people are finding ways to determine what is and isn't good quality. I'd say we're in a good place right now, with challenges, so I'm personally content with them on the site and see no obvious reason to disallow them in our current state of affairs.
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But from Jon Ericson's last question, I strongly feel something very different:
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Challenges are an evolutionary dead end.
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Stack Exchange was designed the same way—with searchable answers in mind. As a result, self-answering a question is a great way spread information. Every design detail feels natural if you focus on making the internet a better place for learning about the topic. If that's not your goal with the site, you will—like a salmon swimming upstream—become exhausted. At every turn, you are fighting the very system of content creation.
...Now what?
Given all the above, the question for you is: How can a site dedicated to Puzzling provide searchable knowledge to the internet? I know what my answer would be, but I'm not active in this community. Therefore, how do you intend to make this site work?
See, it is really not really in agreement to what Emrakul answered.
Now, lets focus on the last paragraph of Jon Ericson's question. There is actually two questions there (since there are two ?). So I will try to guess what his answer to the first would be:
It can't. This site is doomed and will be closed soon.
And for the second:
It is a rhetoric question, not expected to be answered. Except if someone has a magic trick, it is impossible.
I feel extremely frustrated and extremely sad to what is happening in this community. Even if I myself said that a lot of frustration from many people is expected when you are trying to build a community with complex policies questions. But if this is just a doomed big joke and we are all salmons swimming to the wrong way, why would we spend still more energy and brain-time to put effort onto some site that is unwelcome and undesired by their very owners?
What I really would like is to have a place where I could post and read questions and answers about puzzles and puzzling in peace and happiness. But I think that we will either need to look somewhere else for that or build or own place outside StackExchange. Because we seem to be unwelcome here.
By the way, this music3 describes very well what I guess that will happen to the community in the next days.
Feel free to downvote this question. If I could vote on my own questions, this is the first time that I would downvote my own question. On a second thought however, by upvoting this, you would incentive people to come by, read this and maybe post an answer.
And about answering this question? I really would like to see strong and concrete evidence that this site would at least have a chance to have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and that I am just being too pessimistic, that I just happened to have horribly misunderstand what is going on. If I can, I will read the answer and comment as normally. Maybe we still have a some chance, so if you have some brilliant idea maybe you could post it as an answer (or another entire meta-question maybe). But, since I am really doubtful that there will ever be 2015 for this site, in fact, you could post anything as an answer, because in just a few days any answer posted here will probably be no more than some bytes representing tombstones messages inside a ZIP archive in the Area 51 graveyard.
Ok, I think that we are very near to the Game Over. The fun was good, but now the party is over. It was a pleasure to puzzle with you, guys. Maybe we can meet somewhere else someday again. Farewell my friends.
P.S. Some people might say that whining would not make we go anywhere. I completely agree, because I really think that we aren't going anywhere in this site.
1: There is a brazilian meme about that: "Sabe de nada, inocente!"
2: There is probably some people that would commemorate if I in fact quit. And they are already commemorating who already quitted.
3: You might skip the first 13 seconds if you want to actually go to the start of the music.
