I'm a rule-breaker, I've had my posts deleted and
I didn't like it.
In one example, I wrote a long review (when are my posts ever short?) regarding a device I had acquired. It had graphs, tricks I'd learned, reliability information, shortcomings, and could have saved someone a
lot of time. What it also had was a link to an obscure freeware library on github and that broke the T&Cs so they deleted it.
It took me hours to write.
I was pissed. All that information lost. If they'd just edited out that one link or made the contents available to me I could have and would have fixed it.
I have also been called out on other forums by moderators who edited out the bits that broke the T&Cs. The moderators gave a few words as to what was wrong, and told me to not do it again. Always easy to agree with them in hindsight once it was pointed out how I was in violation. Stuff happens.
So I prefer to have my posts edited because when they're deleted the community as a whole loses out. And I know in most cases I'm not going to post it again. This is probably why most of my posts have a dozen edits.
The difference of course is
intent. I never set out to break the rules. I was talking about
issues rather than
people (Why would anyone talk about people on these forums?). When my post was deleted the mods were just doing their jobs. They had no say or latitude in the matter. But on those forums I've never posted there since then. It's not worth my time. I have lots of choices where I can post.
Perhaps I'm a self-deluded narcissist in thinking that what I write might be of value to others. Of course, perhaps when someone writes something like:
they also feel they are trying to help me? IDK for sure, but feels like bad intent. As one guy said earlier, his intent was to "slap the person" to
help them as if they were hysterical. I think violence begets violence, I'm not only not swayed by it, but it's the sort of thing that makes me flip the bozo bit on them - anything they say in the future I'll just view that they have bad intent with a desire to harm rather than help.
That's why it was nice to hear from
Primal1. I thought long and hard about what
they said above,
that even with protections like we have some moderators still abused their authority in other places.
In the end, I came to two conclusions. First, it comes down to the
caliber of the moderator. This is essentially the dilemma every "boss" has, bad employees will drag other employees down and destroy the reputation of your company. Employees come and go, and it's a struggle for the owner. Will's the boss, members and moderators are like employees. It's like any small company you might work for... want it to stay healthy so you can enjoy the benefits then you do what you can for it. From the lowest ranking peon to the CEO, it makes a real difference what everyone does.
The second conclusion was based on
intent. From his description as to what went wrong, it was moderators abusing their powers to push a shared belief (if it wasn't shared moderators wouldn't support the other and the situation should be resolvable). For example, if the moderators were liberal that view would predominate. Most of the conversation on the forums is technical, staying to such topics inherently prevents that form of abuse because it's knowledge
transfer/teaching rather than
opinions. It goes back to the
YOU word, stay away from it and it's far harder to go wrong.
Recently there was a thread about a vendor (yup circling back to what this thread is about). Some people are always going to have good or bad experiences on anything and they're happy to share. The YOU word was dragged out and bad blood flowed. Even perfectly reasonable posts were reported as they were
cabal members trolling the thread. I think at the heart of the problem was one side felt sure the other side had evil intent. Undoubtedly the YOU words weren't helping. A moderator stepped in, edited and deleted posts, everybody was warned. The next day it started right back up and the thread was closed. A new thread appeared (after the moderator suggested it) to continue the discussion and both sides not only refrained from attacks but I believe also came to a conclusion.
So what's funny is,
deleting and
editing didn't solve the root issue. Closing the thread solved the issue because when the players came back they were more careful to not be disrespectful. Being respectful works.
So, my best advice remains unchanged and is the tao of Bill & Ted,
be excellent to each other.