[LintMan]

Originally posted by PvK:
Seems to me terribly heavy-handed for something that I would not have said warranted any such attention. I'd also hope that when a moderator is involved in a discussion that he/she thinks warrants editing other people's Posts, that he should have another, uninvolved moderator look at it and decide whether to do it.

Removing other people's Posts without obviously good and impartial reason can have a lot more negative effect than someone ranting, or even some people flaming each other.

People get quite upset about it. Even if they weren't the ones whose Posts were deleted. Also, it makes it impossible for later readers (or even previous participants looking back to see where a misunderstanding or overreaction came from) to fairly judge what happened. (e.g. People may have later written something which wasn't deleted, but the tone may have had something to do with something that was deleted.)

So what if someone mistakenly Posts about some sort of "old boy network", or there's some misunderstanding going on? It's been a lot worse on other threads.

When Posts start vanishing though, well, I'm with the group who just feels like leaving the forum alone at that point, or finding one with less moderator deletion going on.

Generally, until this one, I've had extreme respect for every post and contribution you've made, Gandalf. So, I hope you see where I'm coming from on this.

I haven't been active in this thread (and don't have a strong an opinion on the topic), but I agree with PvK that deleting Posts to preserve a thread's "tone" is a very very bad precedent, even if done with the best intentions.

As I see it, it is a very slippery slope from there to deleting Posts that maybe "damage the useful tone of the forum" because, say, they "argumentatively/offensively portray the game in a bad/unfair light". It's Shrapnel's forum, so they can do that if they want, but I don't think people really trust a forum like that or feel they can speak freely.

Dom2 is a great game, and this is a pretty good community, so I think we can collectively withstand an occasional misunderstanding, troll, or even flame war.

I also think that if someone's post does need to be moderated, a much more preferable way would be for the moderator to edit down the offending part of the post, and insert an explanation of exactly why the post was moderated. In that way, at least some indication of the history of what people are reacting to is preserved.

Let me add, though, that I don't have any problems with Moderators deleting Posts that contain crud like hate speech, spam, gross obsenities, or wildly off-topic rants (ie: political cause stuff). These forums are free of that stuff, and I'm certainly glad of that and prefer to keep it that way.

Just my 2 cents.