Why is it that some of the most serious repercussions of posting on this board, namely having comments deleted or being banned, can happen without notice or explanation, while even the most benign photo uploaded gets a system notification? Seems like a serious omission to me.
Let me explain; for the second time in as many months I’ve had a comment deleted. In this case, others have responded and even supported the comment, which I found to be fully within the bounds of decorum (admittedly unlike some of my other comments). But the deleting isn’t the issue, it’s the lack of notification that I find most troubling; in a previous instance, I had posted something that was deleted but because I wasn’t notified I thought I had a post failure so I reposted the same comment and was then suspended for a month for reposting.
Point is, in a comment system that seems so sophisticated as to track and notify about so many things, why is a person who is judged out of bounds not even notified when a comment is deleted by a mod, if not given a warning or a reason?
I don’t think notifying everyone in the topic would be, uh… a good idea. But I can certainly empathize with accidentally reposting something that got deleted due to a misunderstanding that maybe it didn’t post correctly.
When I joined the BBS, my unconventional views on many sensitive topics were often seen as concern trolling, and many of my posts were flagged. This was confusing to me because I was addressing people very respectfully, and trying offer thoughtful input, so it honestly didn’t occur to me that my posts were being deleted deliberately. Some kind of notice to the poster - me - would have clarified what happened, while hopefully offering a hint about what the problem was.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I had a reposting bug! When a mod would delete one of my posts, it would appear next time in the “composer panel”, looking exactly like I had merely typed it out and forgotten to submit it. By the time Falcor sent me a few scary posts telling me to stop, I was very nearly banned. I also very nearly just gave up and left on my own, out of frustration.
But I am happy that I stayed! Hopefully my manners are better, and I more often confound than offend. I like this community. And I have also seen why there is vigilant moderation, so I understand a bit better the caution that I encountered.
Yeah I’m not proposing notifying everyone in a thread, necessarily. Right now it seems that when a comment is deleted for being inappropriate it’s gone completely (including quotes, maybe?) and there is no notification to the poster. Either there should be a system notification or the comment should be deleted in place, with some public notice “this comment was deleted for violating our comment policy.” and the user should be notified by the system. It’d be great if the system was able to save the comment that brought the ban, just so people had some context about what and why, but maybe that’s not necessary or wise.
I actually thought there was a system in place before - I seem to remember seeing some “this comment removed” text. Did that change or are there different processes that can get comments removed, one that includes notice and another that doesn’t?
