@Lucas1853, I prefer the delete option but what you said makes sense.

I've edited my first post to let people know I won't be responding after this post.

SO if you guys and girls write on here, you'll need to talk amongst yourselves, cause I didn't want this post to exist anymore past this point so will just not read or reply to anymore responses, no matter how tempting it might be

@mazen, I think the web developers read this forum from time to time, or; the mods got in touch with them.

My back is forward. Should I go post about it?

Moderation:
No, nobody's in trouble here, but I'm speaking officially so the mod hat goes on.

This is my doing, guys. All me. Nobody else. If you have criticism, point it here. But be proper about it.

First of all, there are options within the administration panel about forums. One of those options stops users from deleting posts. Another stops them deleting threads. Yet another, I believe, even stops them editing posts at all.

So, I wanted to run an experiment, and it actually wasn't Brad who prompted it, although his situation was one for which such an experiment would also bear fruit.
Over the last six months to a year, we've had people make topics, get reported, then delete said topics before they can get punished. For some of you, this looked a bit like us admins weren't doing our job; the reality is that in large part this boiled down to lack of evidence.

Well, given that we had at least one banned member floating around, as well as suspicion of at least one more, I thought I'd try something. I very quietly disabled the ability to delete a thread (not a post, you're still free to delete those). My hope was that someone would go and do what they've been doing in the past, and get caught red-handed. Ironically, nobody did.

Only in the last day or two has anybody even noticed that they couldn't delete their own threads anymore, and I made this change without announcing it about two weeks back. I told no one, not even the staff team, because this was purely an experiment, and I thought it best at the time to keep quiet. I'll be honest as well, and say that we're trying to switch communication platforms as well, so this also contributed. The point is, this is on me; secrecy is not my typical mode of address and is not a pattern I intend to repeat.  Now that the cat is out of the bag, I intend to have a staff discussion in order to see if this change should be reverted or not. I am personally of the belief that the change was a good one and should actually stay,but this absolutely needs to be a staff decision.
And lest you think that I was trying to put my views into action and not get caught? Think first, please. Eventually, somebody was going to try and delete a thread they'd created, and would be caught off guard when they found themselves unable to do it when they could before. Unless I wanted to start lying and making things up wholesale - which I won't do, and haven't done - this was going to come out eventually. There was absolutely no chance that I blamed this on code, the webmasters, user error or anything else. I knew that this was going to be a temporary situation, and planned accordingly. The real question was when and how, not if. If you want to see this as anything, call it a trial run by someone who was taking initiative. Perhaps too much initiative, and perhaps I should've shared with the team, but I wanted some data to pull from, and ultimately didn't get it. I do not intend to do this again.

No one has gotten hurt, and no one was caught out unduly by making a personally damning thread that they later wanted to recant, so my attempt at entrapment did not work. I would like to point out, however, that deleting a thread to avoid consequences is not any sort of guarantee that you will actually avoid those consequences at all.

Hopefully that clears a few things up.

I think the questionable aspect of this was not communicating this idea to the staff team. I had my reasons, but as for whether or not they're good reasons, that's not just up to me to decide. I could have gotten the same end result by telling the staff team, if I trust them to keep quiet, which I do. Like I say, however, this was never going to be a permanent change that nobody knew about. It was bound to get out sooner or later, and I knew that going in. Do not characterize this as me being "caught", because even if I had told the staff team, this would have been the end result. Someone would have tried to delete a thread and would have found themselves unable to do so.
My fault, then, is in not communicating as well as I should have with the staff team. This is not a typical problem, and there is no evidence of this having happened before now, and no evidence that it will continue to happen in future, either.

Sometimes the staff are actually really quick, and sometimes they're not. It depends on who you get, how urgent the situation is, and probably a lot of other factors as well.
I'm hesitant to exclude people from a decision unless the wait period is of a decent length, unless the decision needs to be made as soon as possible. This one didn't really have such a fuse on it, which is why I'm owning culpability for not communicating clearly or even just waiting a bit first.
I wanted to act quickly, so I did. At the time, I was having all kinds of trouble accessing the list, which is what led me to create a Discord server, which we're slowly getting up and running.

@Brad, first, welcome back.

And the ability to delete the topic disappeared? Guess who's done that? If you weren't trying to delete your thread, the ability to delete the topic would still exist. And also, last time you were complaining the mods weren't doing their job? And now Jayde did, and you should congratulate him for doing something to prevent you from trying to delete your own threads in the future. Instead of complaining to all the mods again. Lol.

of course he will respond. he just can't help it. but just in case people don't agree with me, i'm leeving and so you can't respond to me either. i'll be back when i wake up though. grins.

I for one approve completely of this change, and hope the rest of the admin team agrees with you Jayde, so it stays. I have been guilty of deleting topics in the past, for frankly completely stupid reasons -- they were not even particularly embarrassing, like Brad's are -- and recent conversations drove home just how impolite that was. With all the trouble deleting topics has caused in the past, I'd be very happy to see it disabled.

As a past mod, I approve of this idea.  It enables people to face their past for what it is so as to learn from it in the present and grow into a better future.  I think the times have been far too many where someone trys to take advantage of the feature to act as if part of their life never happened or they take away a valuable resource for the rest of the community because they're angry with a select few for whatever reason.  Interestingly enough, when the question of "what was your first post" comes up or something similar, I see a ton of people going back and reflecting and saying things like "Good grief I really was an idiot back then, wasn't I?"  That's an admition.  It takes some time to get there, but I do believe the fact that history is written so clearly is the only thing that truly helps along that road, particularly since we as limited creatures tend to forget things if they're not altogether convenient for us to remember.

@45 Calm down. You can still delete your posts, just not your topics. So you can still remove any contribution you personally made on the forum, you just can't remove people's reactions to whatever you said.

Wait, so someone posts an "I'm leaving" post, then predictably returns, then someone piles onto *that* post and says they're leaving? Is that about the size of it?

In an ideal world I'd rather users keep the ability to delete threads, but if that functionality is being abused by people to avoid punishment I have absolutely no problem with this being taken away. But frankly, this is nothing to lose sleep over, and I certainly won't be leaving the forum over it.