I have the following questions pertaining to the deletion of a members post:
What are the criteria for removal?
Who decides?
Can Apache Labs remove a post?
Is the member contacted and given a reason for the action?
Who Can Delete a Members Post
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For profile changes or private issues, please contact a moderator by email or PM (use "The team" link at the bottom of the page)
Who Can Delete a Members Post
W6MY - Chip
Re: Who Can Delete a Members Post
Hi Chip,
Who decides:
Any administrator, moderator, or the original poster themselves can decide to delete a post. Only admin's and mod's can move a post. Sometimes, if you think a post has been deleted, it might have just been moved.
The list of admin's and mod's can be found at the "The team" link at the bottom of the page.
Myself and Gary, NC3Z, do 99.9% of the moderation. Doug, W5WC, has never taken any moderator actions that I know of.
Can Apache remove a post:
The administrator account belongs to Apache Labs. The last time they logged in was in June of 2025, just before I moved the forum to the new server, so if anything has been deleted since then it's not been Apache. They really don't take much of an interest in the forum, especially since it moved to the new server. Indeed, AFIAK there is only a single time in the entire history of the forum where the "administrator" account, meaning Apache themselves, has performed any moderation activity at all, and that was years ago. As I remember, it involved an extremely profane and rambling rant that any of us would have deleted, and this was after the member in question had already received several warnings. That member was ultimately banned because of this.
Criteria:
99% of the time a post is deleted because it is a duplicate of another post by the same member. "Dupes" are poor forum etiquette. Pick a sub-forum and post the question or issue or discussion once. In such cases, quite frankly, we don't PM or otherwise notify the member. They generally get their question answered in the remaining post on the same topic and never miss the duplicate post.
On very rare occasions the post may be in some way inappropriate. Profane ranting, unsubstantiated accusations, personal attacks, etc. In those cases the member will generally receive a warning. The good news is that we have not had a lot of that sort of thing on the forum, but it has happened. Gary and I would rather not have to take such action, and prefer to chime in with a "Let's all take a breath" kind of post and give people a chance, but sometimes it just doesn't work.
As for moving posts, that's a matter of curation of the knowledgebase. Sometimes it's obvious why it moved, sometimes it is more subtle. Sometimes there just no perfect sub-forum. Again, it's a judgement call. But, moving a topic will always pop it up on the Active topics list, which is always available from the "hamburger" menu icon at the top left of every page.
I just checked the logs and I don't see any of your posts being deleted? Is there something specific that went missing?
73,
Scott
Who decides:
Any administrator, moderator, or the original poster themselves can decide to delete a post. Only admin's and mod's can move a post. Sometimes, if you think a post has been deleted, it might have just been moved.
The list of admin's and mod's can be found at the "The team" link at the bottom of the page.
Myself and Gary, NC3Z, do 99.9% of the moderation. Doug, W5WC, has never taken any moderator actions that I know of.
Can Apache remove a post:
The administrator account belongs to Apache Labs. The last time they logged in was in June of 2025, just before I moved the forum to the new server, so if anything has been deleted since then it's not been Apache. They really don't take much of an interest in the forum, especially since it moved to the new server. Indeed, AFIAK there is only a single time in the entire history of the forum where the "administrator" account, meaning Apache themselves, has performed any moderation activity at all, and that was years ago. As I remember, it involved an extremely profane and rambling rant that any of us would have deleted, and this was after the member in question had already received several warnings. That member was ultimately banned because of this.
Criteria:
99% of the time a post is deleted because it is a duplicate of another post by the same member. "Dupes" are poor forum etiquette. Pick a sub-forum and post the question or issue or discussion once. In such cases, quite frankly, we don't PM or otherwise notify the member. They generally get their question answered in the remaining post on the same topic and never miss the duplicate post.
On very rare occasions the post may be in some way inappropriate. Profane ranting, unsubstantiated accusations, personal attacks, etc. In those cases the member will generally receive a warning. The good news is that we have not had a lot of that sort of thing on the forum, but it has happened. Gary and I would rather not have to take such action, and prefer to chime in with a "Let's all take a breath" kind of post and give people a chance, but sometimes it just doesn't work.
As for moving posts, that's a matter of curation of the knowledgebase. Sometimes it's obvious why it moved, sometimes it is more subtle. Sometimes there just no perfect sub-forum. Again, it's a judgement call. But, moving a topic will always pop it up on the Active topics list, which is always available from the "hamburger" menu icon at the top left of every page.
I just checked the logs and I don't see any of your posts being deleted? Is there something specific that went missing?
73,
Scott