Moderation in moderation

I think "a fair amount of topics simply vanishing these days" is an exaggeration. There have been very few, and some of those at the request of the person who started the thread. My reasons for deleting these are not as simplistic as you might think. Be happy you are just a poster without the responsibility of making these decisions. What I do is delete the offending posts, email the necessary individuals off the forum to settle things, and keep a backup of anything deleted in case the poster requests it back. This takes care of the situation without disturbing the rest of the forum.

The reasons for this are as follows. If in the middle of a thread there erupts some off-topic arguing and someone writes a sensible response to an irrational provocation, deleting the latter will leave the first out of place and still off-topic. To spare people the embarrassment of looking like they are talking to the air, I delete that out-of-place post. I leave it up long enough for those involved to read each others' replies, but not so long that it continues being a festering sore for everyone else. If the off-topic arguing concerns actual debate of topics instead of the venting of personal matters, then yes I let it go on or move the posts to their own thread.

We already discussed the option of having a "back alley" or "battle arena" where threads or posts that have degenerated into bickering can continue. The conclusion was that making room for such activity invites it, and the nurtured hostility would not stay isolated to that special area of the forum. Also, keep in mind that email is better suited for resolving personal matters off the forum.

I experimented with moving troublesome posts to their own thread, in the theory that making room for this would accommodate the freewill of the participants to work things out amongst themselves. The end result was a runaway chain reaction that far from resolving matters only made them worse. I received complaints about why I allowed such energy wasting to continue, why I provided a space for it in the first place as though condoning and encouraging something that serves the forum no purpose and actually lowers its integrity. Trouble that starts on irrational grounds rarely have a rational resolution. Remember this.

There is another important thing to consider, which is that fights between two people are pretty straightforward as happens in email exchanges. It's like a game of ping pong, back and forth. On a forum, however, fights rarely stay between just two people. Like a monkey jumping onto the ping pong table and swatting at the exchange, a naive third party can enter the fight and picks on some secondary detail not even related to the original argument to complicate things. By that point it degenerates into useless personal bickering, emotionalism, exaggerations, things distortedly brought up from the past, and so on, which has no purpose staying up permanently if it concerns only a few and could be resolved off the forum.

Also, I know the difference between tense incidents that arise out of mere differences of opinion or misunderstanding (which should be allowed to reach their conclusion) and incidents that are orchestrated, remote viewed, and catalyzed by mischievous forces intending solely to screw things up (which should be nipped in the bud). The latter count on the "monkey on the ping pong table" principle to create a chain reaction, and this has happened too many times in the past because orchestrated incidents were not stymied soon enough. The longer these go on, the more damage they cause. This is what experience has shown. Someone will complain regardless of whether I let such drama continue or whether I clean it up sooner, therefore I have chosen not to sacrifice the forum integrity by giving the predator within tapped members the absolute freedom it desires, and so I understand and accept its protests.

Interesting points all around. I just got back from a funeral so i didnt have a chance to post earlier.

You make a convincing argument. I see that you probably wont be convinced to change this and you have thought about it more than the normal admin does with the "its the way i say it is and thats final". So i wont pursue you to change the rules any further than that but i would like to point out a few things.

1, there have been 2 threads that i have participated in that have been dealth with by the hand of the administration. And i have not kept an eye on the entire forum and have only read it from time to time. I could be unlucky in that both the vanishing topics/posts were made in topics i participated in and then my argument would be invalid, invalid in saying that "a fair amount".  The reason i noticed it is that most forums where i post, posts arnt deleted but they are locked so the vanishing of posts creates something of a bizzare feeling in that there then is no sign of ever having posted anything.

2, True that i have no responsibility in maintaining this forum. And as such these are merely conversation points and such.

And as one last thing i must point out that saying:

Is, in my eyes, a draconian way of labeling counter arguments, or arguments for "more freedom" as coming from "the predator within tapped members" is a convinient way of labeling critisism. I do not believe that you or i or anyone else, on or off these forums, has the ability to see and accurately enough label counter arguments as to what motivates a opposite point of view.

It would be the same thing as me saying that you deleted the argument because of personal bias to the argumenting parties, as opposed to preferance to keep the forum in an orderly fashion. Since i do not personally believe that you deleted it because of personal opinions of the parties involved, me making such a statement on fairly flimsy grounds would be a "straw man" argument.

No, i didnt misunderstand what he meant, you, indeed, misunderstood what i meant. I have no problem with curbing the exsess drama from the forums. But with the risk of curbing points that the drama might bring up, true that drama might bring it up in lesser amounts than civil conversations. I however advocate the locking of topics as opposed to the deletion of topics because of the ability to start threads in different areas if the argument itself breaks up. I recently posted in the aliens in media, and that conversation has ranged from 2005-2006 and has had a change from talking about car insurance to talking bout super models. If now the conversation would get into a personal argument and bickering, if one deletes all expect the car insurances and those immidiatly following then one would lose alot.

If one would however lock it then the parts of interest could be saved by users, limiting the work montalk has to do with each topic as users could themselfs find material that they wanted and start a new thread. And it would also serve as a memory to get a hold of old material and see previous political standpoints and developements of ideas with different people.

I have no interest in personal fightings, i did post on the same topic and if you remeber i did stand up for you and montalk in saying that while the argument that he made is, somewhat, valid, the way he makes it is overly offencive and inappropriate.

But as i made my comments to the administration (montalk) and i already said in my previous post that i have no beef with the administrative decicions as they are his to make and i am a quest in his forum and behave as such. So when montalk illustrated why he made the choice to keep the forums as such i was satisfied in that his point does stick, it is opposite to what i believe but it is hist position to make and i ho no argument with him on this.

However, what i did point out is that to call my critisim as:

If i misunderstood what that means then montalk has my sincere apology. The way i understand that is quite simple, "if i let go of my rules all hell breaks loose" "only the predators in tapped members complain" And that as i see it, labels dissent as coming from the predator within the members in question, instead of a simple disagreeance, and that is what i wanted to point out, not the drama involved. As the thought of all wishes for absolute freedom comes from the predator is something i find noteworthy of pointing out. Montalk dosnt have to change, you dont have to change, i dont have to change, but as long as i am a member of this forum i consider it my duty to get involved in debates about how it should run. As long as, atleast, this section of the forum has the text "suggestions" in it.

So, in closing, i'd like to state one last time that i understand the decicions that montalk makes and i have no problem with them, i do have a problem with laveling dissent so flimsily in such harsh terms. But as that is a personal issue as opposed to the point of this topic i'll leave it at that.