Mods removing posts really bug me

[Redbeard]

Can some one explain to me the advantage of completely deleting a post, instead of just editing it out with a mod warning?

This has been discussed before. Here and Here. In my mind the result was that you can't please everybody and moderating is hard.

[Aphelion]

Redbeard, that post doesn't quite address my concern, but its my fault that I was not clear. What I am suggesting is that mods append comments to questionable posts, not edit the actual content. For example, it would work something like this:

Some useless provocative gibberish.

Mod Edit: Do not post useless provocative gibberish. You have been warned and any further infraction will result in a ban. Thread locked.

Or if the post contains really objectionable content that needs to be removed:

Before:

Hai gaiz here is some obscene pornographic material!!!!!111ONE!!!ELEVEN!!111one

After:

Mod Edit: Pornographic content is not allowed on this forum. The user is banned for this post.

Mod edits should be transparent and trackable, and ought not change the content of the original post. I would agree with you that altering the content of the post with no explanation is worse than deletion, but thats not what I am advocating here. Moderators should be given power to police the forum, but it must be clear when a mod action is taken.

[fwiffo]

In the case of spam, the post and the user really have to be deleted, and quickly. For one, the forum would be clogged up with dozens of robo-spam posts per day, which would be annoying even if they were edited out by mods. Also, there are places in the user profile where spammers can hide links to their evil spammy websites. If the posts were just edited, it's possible that one of the links would be missed, and then spidered by search-engines, and the spammer would be rewarded and encouraged to do a lot more spamming.

In the case of spam, there is almost never any doubt that it's robot-generated spam. Robots and spammers aren't human, and don't have feelings, and the spam makes money for the spammer by stealing value from the forum, so I don't think there's any reason to not delete it. There have been one or two cases where we had particularly sneaky bots, and we had a discussion between mods about it.

Deleting a post for other reasons is very rare; the most common case is accidental double-posts (which is one reason why users have the power to delete their own post if it's the last in the thread). In that case, nothing is lost.

[hyperpape]

Fwiffo: wow, I had no idea phpbb didn't use nofollow tags. I guess I need to start linking to casino sites in my signature.

[fwiffo]

It can be modified to add rel="nofollow", but it doesn't have it by default. The problem is that you'd have to modify it in several places to be sure you get all the links in the profile, messages, signature, etc. It would also punish everyone for spammer behavior. If you're a regular, valuable contributor to the forum, IMO there's no reason you shouldn't get search engine traffic from useful links you post (so long as they're not crap).

And even if we could handle the nofollow thing perfectly, the posts would still clutter up the forum with crap very quickly.

(I should add - I'm speaking for myself here, not necessarily as official policy.)

[hyperpape]

I see what you're saying. I'd just acquired an assumption that every website with user created content had started using nofollow.