@AnnaLear Well, darn. On the other hand, congrats!

On a related note: I remember that you were elected as a community moderator on SO, but that doesn't seem to be the case and I can't find any follow-up Q&A. Did I miss something?

Thanks! Those are great links. Insights within and across tag communities are definitely interesting.

Has there ever been easier rep on SE? :)

While this is a fair suggestion, I'd certainly rather have people download excess code than suggest that people learn to use Unicode for formatting. Wasting a few bytes for some users isn't quite the same as wasting brain cells. Nonetheless, mentioning Unicode points to gradual evolution in browsers, and perhaps a future version of HTML or browsers will make this question irrelevant.