In the past, I've always seen offensive posts handled by the mods using red text, and spam posts handled by deletion. Today, for the first time, I noticed at least two threads where (AFAICT) offensive posts were completely removed rather than the mods posting in the thread. And I'm not talking about a case of mods removing the body of the post (which I can understand), it's like all evidence of the post existing is completely gone, except for a couple of references in quotes.
Is this a shift if policy? I can tell from the posts I witnessed that the poster in question was clearly trolling and was likely outright banned from ENWorld, and I fully support that response. And I understand the desire to remove the text that's offensive to improve the mood of the boards and cut down on the gaper effect. But removing all traces of the posts seems a little heavy handed, and certainly won't help others see what kind of behavior is unacceptable here. And in at least one case, it made the conversation afterwards a little hard to follow.
Is this a shift if policy? I can tell from the posts I witnessed that the poster in question was clearly trolling and was likely outright banned from ENWorld, and I fully support that response. And I understand the desire to remove the text that's offensive to improve the mood of the boards and cut down on the gaper effect. But removing all traces of the posts seems a little heavy handed, and certainly won't help others see what kind of behavior is unacceptable here. And in at least one case, it made the conversation afterwards a little hard to follow.