I concur. One of the things that bothered me about the Disqus version of BB was when disemvowelling went away in favor of out-and-out post deletion. Sometimes (surprisingly often) a post would be deleted for being objectionable, but not before it had engendered a few responses. Usually, if a post were genuinely offensive to the point of being egregious, it would receive few (if any) responses before deletion. But sometimes, and just about every day, a comment would be deleted for having simply unpopular tone or content, rather than being an out-and-out violation of the site’s TOS. And sometimes, as people responded to that comment insofar as the merits of the comment deserved, the original comment would be deleted but the responses were not, which made for a confusing absence of context. Killing all the responses as well as the offending comment wouldn’t be a preferable solution, as often those comments brought up valuable insights that might not have been raised without that initial offending comment.
In instances like that, where maybe Antinous might have brought the hammer down a tad too precipitously, I greatly missed disemvowelling, which preserved the context for anyone who cared, but made it tougher for the offending comment to offend.
One of the strengths of this community is its variety of opinion on a wide range of important topics. And some of us here are foulmouthed and crotchety and well as insightful and penetrating. Disemvowelling would be an onerous, time-consuming task if it had to be done manually, but if there’s a semi-automated way to do it as the result of user flags, as Medievalist describes, I’d be all for it.
