Moderation by Deletion

[Deset Gled]

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.

 

[Umbran]

We try not to delete actual conversation too much. When someone has just gotten a little heated and wandered over the line, the usual process is to edit and remind them that we are family-friendly.

In this case, there were several posts, and we believe the person was trolling (and working around a ban, as well). In such a case, we are not going to spend the time to carefully and thoughtfully edit around the problematic bits, hoping to save that person's part of the conversation. Go too far, and we wipe you out with extreme prejudice.

 

[Morrus]

It depends what it is. If it's chock full of obscenities or profanities, it probably goes. We don't want that stuff on our site, and when someone (especially someone banned a few times making new accounts to continue doing it) is posting a series of them in an attempt to inconvenience or make work for us we're just gonna hit the "spambam" button which nukes the account and removes all posts in one little click with zero effort or time expended on our part. The result is they keep making lots of effort, and it doesn't cost us more than half a second to clean up. Typing this is far more effort than we've had to expend in total on the person in question!

That's so late 1990-s. Rarely happens these days, and the built-in tools in modern forum software make it so easy to handle.

 

[Deset Gled]

posting a series of them in an attempt to inconvenience or make work for us we're just gonna hit the "spambam" button which nukes the account and removes all posts in one little click with zero effort or time expended on our part.

Thanks for that info; it puts things into a much better perspective. I can certainly understand that the nuke button is easier that manually editing a series of posts from a dedicated troll. It would be nice if the nuke option left some note in the thread that a post had been deleted to remove confusion, but I imagine that's a vbulletin thing you don't have the option to change.

 

[Plane Sailing]

It also depends upon whether something is deep in a thread, or fairly recent at the end of a thread. We used to delete problem posts a LOT in the first decade, there has generally been less and less need for it nowadays - but may still be needed.

Mods can still see deleted posts and threads in most cases; sometimes we might delete something and then review it amongst ourselves.

Cheers