Now you see it, now you don't

I have had a couple of posts vanished without a trace. What causes the editors to step in and delete something?

I see all variety of insults and asinine stuff here every day, but it usually stays up.

I see all variety of off topic posts that stay up.

The common thread I think I see between my vanished posts was: they were rebuttals pointing out facts related to US dominance (geography comparison, GDP comparison, military comparison, etc).

Why are factual (off topic) posts ok but random off topic posts not ok?

How long before this vanishes?

If you go here you can find out what happened to your posts, although the reasons are sometimes nonsense or just plain bizarre!

Thanks, I did not know that information was available.

I actually thought I may have never hit send. Thought I was losing it.

So now when I am feeling arrogant or asinine, I have to throw in something on topic? :-)

Maybe TT should consider a distributed moderation system with meta-mods, like slashdot has used for years. Basically, all users can periodically get mod points, bad posts get modded down, useless crap is still there but you have to choose to see it (change your viewing threshold), and moderation abuse gets caught through moderating the moderations.

For most of the posts that are removed, the reason is "off topic". Second most common reason is "personal attack".

For example, your post about U.S. dominance (quoted below) was clearly off topic in a discussion about Germans who say "Nee":


Sure, you may have been replying to earlier off topic posts. But those have since been removed too. And you shouldn't have replied to them in the first place. Or if you simply must reply, then you should have split off by starting a new, separate topic.

As for you seeing lots of insults every day, well sure, you see the ones that are not removed. Remember, however, you don't see the ones that are removed. By very definition. So for all you know, 95% of insults are removed, and 5% remain. You see the 5%, but assume that to be 100%, because it's all you can see.

Also, moderation is not instantaneous. Sometimes a topic is only cleaned up the next morning. It's likely that you see insults and off-topic posts before they are removed.

Moderation doesn't, and can't, check every single one of the ~1,100 posts made per day. Instead we apply a "pressure" to keep general discipline. Members are expected to learn what is acceptable and what not, and then post accordingly.

If you see a post that warrants removal, you can use the report function to alert the moderators.

As for a distributed community moderation system like Slashdot, if you'd like to program it for us then great! Unfortunately the system we use, Invision Power Board, doesn't provide this function. Even if it did, it is not clear that it would work. TT gets 1% the amount traffic that Slashdot does, so the number of community members who would actively moderate would likely be so tiny as to be ineffective. But we'd certainly give it a try if we had the software.

Thanks for the detailed response. I certainly am learning proper behavior thanks to your edits.

• Don't post chat in a no-chat zone.
• Don't reply to off-topic posts or post off-topic.

However, I am worried that your list of editors may get overrun if/as TT grows significantly. It is an interesting community and fairly well-behaved.

As for programming, I realize any modification would be a headache. If you do consider it, I encourage you to not follow the digg model where everyone can vote for everything all the time. Pure democracy is not a good thing and many ideas are suppressed.

When I clicked on this thread this morning there were no posts here at all.

I thought it was a hilarious joke from Ed bob (i.e. vanishing posts).

I later realised it must have been due to the maintenance taking place but it did make me giggle at the time.