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On the subject of thread moderation, I have a thought or two (for obvious reasons) BUT I have absolutely no insight into this thread's moderation. I didn't see all the posts, haven't asked anyone about it and don't expect I'd be told, even if I had asked. My admin days are long gone.
So, that said, most of the mods here are volunteers. Though some got 'volunteered'.
I have, in the past, sometimes spent hours and hours trying to elegantly clean up a thread. It is VERY hard word in discussion threads with long posts. And there is a significant danger that if you try to 'tweak' such posts, you can end up distorting what the poster meant, which not only takes hours not a few minutes, but is arguably more misleading than just deleting posts.
Then, again speaking from the past, sometimes I might have time to remove a thread, clean it CAREFULLY, and put it back. But sometimes not. At which point, I could just dump the whole thing, do a crude post-delete cleanup, or leave it but lock it so it doesn't get even more fractious.
There often is no perfect solution.
And, on more than a few occasions, I ended up being called a Nazi for picking what I considered to be the least worst option, because I had the temerity to interfere at all. I was even told I didn't have the 'authority' to do so, which of course was utter drivel, that being a central part of the job.
As I said, I don't have the first clue what's been done in this thread, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's either time constraints, or not wanting even worse mangling of meanings by editing posts, or both, but while needing to do something with it, and regarding removing some posts as better than removing the whole thread. But it's an imperfect world.
Oh, and all this is a large part of why I stepped down, after the best part of 20 years, having just had enough.
PS. IIRC, nobody here was involved in calling me a Nazi. That was something I wasn't going to stand for, as an admin, so I sure get why people don't like it.
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