The Question and Answer Board

[Was (Bob)]

Just wanted you to know that I'm not ignoring your posts just because I'm not replying to them. On many of them, I'm copying the links to myself so I can look at them more in depth when I've got more time and we're in a better position to consider more radical changes, but in all of them I think you're raising extremely valid points, and Matt and I have been actively discussing some of them, including this post just now.

Regarding the lack of value of restoring a deleted post, I disagree. I don't expect that anything approaching a majority of the potential readers of a post will have gotten to it by the time I review and restore it, but I don't have figures to back that up.

But my immediate goal here is to assure that the inappropriate deletions don't happen. As you can tell, it's right at the top of my list. Arguably, it would've been better to limit chairmen to deleting only vulgarity, threats, and privacy invasions and forwarding the others to me, but I don't (currently) think that such radical unempowerment (I can make up words too) is necessary or desirable at this time.

I feel that the application of it by a handful of people has been too liberal, but I don't want to get too conservative in response to that and unempower the many because of way it's been used by the few.

And I'm not saying that the people who I feel have been applying it too liberally are "bad people". It's apparent that until I started rocking the boat, they were either allowed to or firmly believed they were allowed to keep things "warm and fuzzy" if that's what they wanted to do.

Keep in mind, too, that what I'm wrestling with is the stock-specific threads. If a thread isn't specific to a stock, I see no problem with the chairmen insisting on "warm and fuzzy" or even insisting that each post in that thread must contain the word "purple", if they want. As long as it's applied consistently.

I just don't feel it's right or serves the community to allow capriciousness on the part of the chairman in stock-specific threads.

Bob