We’ve all seen it. You are on a forum. A thread starts getting out of hand. Suddenly, the next time you log in, the whole thing is gone. Sometimes hundreds of good posts vanish because of a few bad ones. Almost always, by website policy, no explanation is given. The thread is just gone. And even discussing it further is verboten.
Once in a while, a thread will disappear for reasons nobody can figure out. I’ve seen cases where I and the other main participants have PMed each other, and asked why the heck the thread, which none of us thought contained rules violations or rude posts, was deleted or locked. No explanation has been given so we are all at a loss. In these cases, inquiries to the higher ups are either met with silence, or with a canned response such as, “By website policy we do not discuss locked or deleted threads.”
Just recently, this happened at another site. I won’t name the site, but it’s a social type of a site like Photobucket where you can share and discuss user-created content. On the site you can make up your own social group, sort of like a sub-forum. Other site members can join the group and discuss the topic, kind of the way Yahoo! groups works. These groups are public (I don’t think there’s a way to make them private, actually). Anyone can sign up and post. The group creator is the administrator but the administration tools are pretty simplistic.
Anyway, in this group, which had existed for many years, I had occasionally noticed things going on that probably violated the overall site rules. For example, links to certain policed domains are blocked on this website, and people have regularly done things to get around the block. For example, imagine if the site doesn’t allow discussion of MMOs and “guildportal.com” is a blocked domain. People would post links to say this guild’s site as “****portal.com/shadowfire” where *** = guild.” Clearly this is a deliberate attempt to get around the domain block. Yet these things have been allowed to go on for years, so people kept doing it.
Then there was the posting of content, where the rules clearly state you can only post your own content, not copy other people’s content and upload it as your own. So imagine a site like Sourceforge where you upload someone else’s (copyrighted) computer code into your own repository. Again this is a no-no.
As I say, I have seen these things going on for at least a couple of years, and always in the back of my head I have wondered if those posts would get deleted. They never were. Occasionally users got banned (their posts would suddenly be listed as having no author, etc), but the social forum continued unscathed.
Until last night.
Suddenly I logged back into this site and the group was not listed. “There is no such group on this site,” was the error message. I thought I had typed the URL wrong but checking indicated that no, the whole thing was gone (probably deleted). I PMed the group moderator, and he wrote back saying he had no idea what had happened, and that he had never received any warnings or communications from the site overlords. Just zap, without warning, the group is gone.
Now, again, I know this is not unusual. And I understand the reasons for it. Flame wars are almost certain to start if deletions or locks are explained — debates about the debate, flames about the flame, etc. And it’s not as if PMing the moderator will necessarily stop that, since the first thing an angry mod will often do is copy-paste the polite PM from the administrator and try to start another flame war. I can see them thinking that, all things considered, the best option is to just delete it silently and never speak of it again. And as I say, I’ve seen more than enough going on there that I have often expected deletions of threads (though NOT the whole group, as most threads have been pretty innocent). Indeed I had been agitating for months that we should get our OWN domain and host our own site rather than being a sub-forum on a site with rules we might not like and moderation we cannot control.
However, this incident makes me wonder if it is really the best course of action. Several group members and I have been involved in a hail of PMs at the site in the last 16 hours or so that clearly indicates that no one other than myself was even aware that the mild to moderately serious violations I had noticed WERE violations (one complained at me for not mentioning it, but I was always afraid that calling attention to it was more likely to cause a ban than just ignoring it and letting it go, and I was not, after all, a group moderator, just a member — and it’s also not possible to claim that substituting *** for a blocked domain name, the most common infraction by far, could have been done without the user realizing EXACTLY what he/she was doing). Even those of us who had noticed and mildly worried about the infractions have no idea which infraction, if any, precipitated the moderation. Nobody knows why the whole group, rather than a few questionable threads, was eliminated. Requests by the group moderator to the higher ups have so far gone unanswered (but it’s only been 3/4 of a day so maybe they will respond… however given the history of these things I doubt it).
Regardless of what happens at this site, the incident has, I say, made me question whether the “delete without comment and refuse to answer PMs about it” policy really is the best course of action. As I say, I understand why sites do this. But it seems to me they are asking to have to repeatedly moderate threads if they don’t give people a reason why the moderation is going on. The *** for a blocked domain thing was not created by members of my group. LOTS of people in other groups had done it long before we did. Perhaps those were moderated (eventually) too… it takes time to catch up to all the violators. But if people are not told WHY they were moderated, how can we expect them to learn from their mistakes?
Here on WordPress, this blog of mine has pretty strict policies about staying on topic and a few times people have posted what can only be described as ads in the comment section, and I have always just deleted those. But if the poster ever PMed me to ask why I had moderated his comment, I would tell him exactly why (“Ads are not allowed on this site, see house rule 7, section a, paragraph c, subsection 2… j/k about the sections). I don’t see how people can be expected to learn which “borderline” activities that are not always moderated have “gone too far” otherwise. When people are left sitting around saying, “Why did this thread get deleted?”, there’s no chance they can learn from it.
I am sure most site owners would say that their rules are clear, and that there’s no reason to do this. They assume the violators are deliberately being bad — and in the case of “*** = guild”, they clearly are. But is that why the group was deleted, or did someone, unknowingly, commit a much worse infraction? One that he could potentially repeat over and over again on the site not realizing it… causing the need for constant moderation, possibly even being banned. I’ve always felt that education is better than ignorance, and thought that it was more worthwhile to explain the discipline, rather than just doing it silently. Otherwise, people can’t learn form their mistakes and there is no chance that their behavior will improve.
