Well, it has finally occurred. An entire topic of mine was deleted without any justifiable cause or reason given as to exactly which guideline I supposedly offended. It appears it may be time for me to spend less time on here, and search for freer spaces for speech, as it seems that such speech is no longer welcome here.
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I'm convinced that the moderation of this forum is done by a bunch of manic depressive monkeys throwing darts in a room somewhere. Nothing for huge periods of time, then intense bursts of random moderation.
Consider the actions taken against "Kenny": they let him post for weeks at a time on each new account, then in a flurry they ban it and deleted his posts. I'm not 100% sure I'd ban him; but if that is what you have decided to do, then do it.
Although I think we are a bunch of primates, the moderation in the forums is intentionally a bit flexible in order to give people with opposing positions room to discuss and have genuine debates. In the case of Kenny, if every account that was suspected to be Kenny by forum members was removed few of us would be left. But regardless, I will bring up your concerns with Armin and the site team.
If it walks like Kenny, talks like Kenny, uses Kenny's IP block, and admits to being Kenny; it is probably safe to assume it is Kenny.
Being the selfish sort, my preference, of course, would be for you to stay.
Believe me, friends, I am as disappointed as you; if not more so. It seems these days that other peoples fe-fe's are more important than actual discussion, and I have witnessed first-hand how this kind of nonsense has made almost every forum slide straight into Orwell's fever dream.
"There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."
that is my fav quote, from my fav book
I love it. I am not sure I would call it my favorite, but I do love it, and it gives us adequate reasons to err on the side of liberty rather than political caution. It is unfortunate that his message did not take as well as he would have hoped, many things happening today would be enough to give him seizures.
Hi Travis,
We're sorry to hear about this. I've checked on the moderator's logs and they have not removed threads belonging to you. We have been experiencing technical issues with our server and currently working to get things running smoothly. If at all possible, would you please let us know what the title of the thread is and the date of posting so that we can check our database?
Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience.
It was called something like "religious fundamentalists and their apologists drive me crazy" and it was made around two days ago. I could be more specific, but it also disappeared from my list of created topics and replies, which usually only happens when they are deleted. It is curious, though, as just before it was deleted a moderator seemed to take exception to it. I will, however, accept that it is a server issue and hope it is fixed soon.
Thank you. We are currently looking into it.
Hi Travis,
You said that a moderator seemed to take exception to the thread that was deleted. Do you remember the name of the Moderator?
Ellie Harris
Sorry for my timing Travis. Your post calling for theist to leave and then your unwillingness to be a bit more specified in your venting is why I removed your thread topic. If you wish to leave the forums I understand. I'd rather you stayed, which was why I made a post in the hub about venting there and tried to prod you fir more of an explanation in the thread topic I removed.
"Your post calling for theist to leave..."
At no point in my topic did I call for all theists to leave the forum. I told people who fit the description(the three contextual descriptors) in the topic that we(the collective of humanity) did not need them anymore.
"...and then your unwillingness to be a bit more specified in your venting is why I removed your thread topic."
I was very specific, I gave three examples of the behavior I was talking about, but I suppose both context and descriptions were not specific enough for some people. Even so, this is also what I said in my thread, yet was summarily ignored.
"If you wish to leave the forums I understand. I'd rather you stayed, which was why I made a post in the hub about venting there and tried to prod you fir more of an explanation in the thread topic I removed."
We'll see, if you are going to wantonly delete posts you don't approve of, it would seem that the guidelines become worse than meaningless. This never SHOULD have been a problem, as there was seemingly no legitimate reason for my post being deleted, yet it was. I am going to try to be very careful here, so my point is well understood:
I was censored for no apparently legitimate reason, will this continue happening in the future, or will there be a more thorough review process to prevent such excesses from occurring?
We apologize for the confusion, our dev team has been working on the permissions for the forums and there were some inconsistencies that allowed moderators to delete posts instead of just unpublishing them for review. We are making adjustments now to make sure that this does not happen again.
Based on our review, your thread did not violate any of the forum rules and shouldn't have been deleted. Once again, we would like to apologize for this.
I accept your apology, and I hope the adjustments go well. Let us hope this does not occur too much in the future.