[04-FEB-2013] Disappearing posts

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to explain three possible reasons why a post might disappear:

  1. Sometimes trolls who come to BLF with the sole intent of causing trouble start off nice and then turn nasty. In obvious cases of trolling, their accounts are deleted, and all of their threads they started are also removed. So even if their initial thread generated a good discussion, all of it (including the comments by other BLF users) will be indiscriminately removed, regardless of the nature of the content.
  2. Sometimes when a legitimate BLF user makes the bad decision of posting about controversial social, political, or religious issues, it creates so much fighting among normally peaceful BLF users that I have to remove the entire thread. To be fair to everyone and also in order to save time, instead of cleaning up posts one by one, I remove the whole thread. In this case, I contact the starter of the thread to kindly remind him about the rules, and in most cases the original poster agrees or even requests that the thread be removed. Again, all comments in the controversial thread are indiscriminately removed, regardless of their content.
  3. On rare occasions, members don’t contact me about controversial threads or rude posts by some legitimate user who is having a bad day, and instead use the SPAM button to moderate those posts. On a few rare occasions, this has caused posts to be temporarily removed. If this happens to the original poster of a thread, the entire thread will get removed. However, the posts are not permanently deleted, and I will soon notice the bogus SPAM button activity and recover the mistakenly removed posts. I have also made some changes in the SPAM button algorithm to further reduce the chances of this happening.

I hope this helps clear things up a little bit. Thanks for reading! Have fun.

Just in case :wink:

Lol. There’s your pet troll, err squirrel, gords :stuck_out_tongue:

:bigsmile: gotta love our very own kryshill, he’s one in a million.

Well, me for one hates when users remove their posts. When I read old threads and read responses to posts that doesn’t exist any more it completely destroys the flow and continuity. Why not just edit the post with something like “Comment removed”?

So thats where all my posts have gone! Grrrr! |(