Moving posts to a new thread

BlueTan85 said:

If moderators saw to it to extract this one user's posts from the P85D thread and collect them in this "exile thread" then that is disgraceful. The censorship of the original sequence of an online group's conversation is an ugly practice that I wish was not tolerated nor ever given precedent in this forum.

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This is not an exile thread - it is in the same area of the forum. But it was derailing the P85D delivery thread and a number of people were complaining about it. Moving posts is not censorship. Deleting posts would be a form of censorship, if this were a public place. But posts are rarely deleted & only in cases of TOS violation.

"Ugly practice" seems a bit dramatic. You believe moving the posts changes the sequence of a conversation. Others felt that the posts that were moved were changing the sequence of the conversation and were calling for something to be done.

BlueTan85 said:

From time to time the actions of the moderators of this forum readily remind the participants that the owners of TMC have rights to the entirety of all words ever posted by each and every participant in this forum and can do whatever they wish with these words, in perpetuity. All hail the moderator for the latest reminder.

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Lighten up. We're all doing the best that we can. It's a car forum.

BlueTan85 said:

If moderators saw to it to extract this one user's posts from the P85D thread and collect them in this "exile thread" then that is disgraceful. The censorship of the original sequence of an online group's conversation is an ugly practice that I wish was not tolerated nor ever given precedent in this forum.

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As someone who has used many internet forums, I've got to say that the moderators here do an excellent job and are far less heavy-handed with respect to moving posts than moderators at many other forums. In my opinion they do an excellent job of keeping threads appropriately on topic while performing a delicate balancing act of keeping the inevitable thread drift to a minimum while not moving too many posts. And in this specific case I think splitting off the comments that they did was warranted. The original tracking thread is a pretty important one, this week is likely to be a very important one in the thread's history, and if the thread continued to be cluttered and monopolized the way it had been of late many forum users may simply have chosen to abandon it. I think the moderators made exactly the right call.

BlueTan85:


1) Register a domain (like teslauncensored.com) at namecheap.com
2) Pay for site hosting (can also be done at namecheap).
3) Build or download forum software
4) Build out content
5) Invite users

However, I would hope you would also moderate. I hate seeing spam after spam posts. To not remove speech renders the value of a forum close to nil.

BlueTan85 said:

It is an exile thread. The posts by participants were removed and placed in a different thread, forever excised from their original context. It is censorship: it removes speech uttered by participants when and where the speech was uttered. But I know better than to debate this with you. I recognize such is futile. It is how things are done in TMC.

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You can always post on the TM forum instead if you don't like it here.

BlueTan85 said:

IThe posts by participants were removed and placed in a different thread, forever excised from their original context. It is censorship: it removes speech uttered by participants when and where the speech was uttered. But I know better than to debate this with you. I recognize such is futile. It is how things are done in TMC.

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Keeping order brings clarity and highlights different conversations. Most forums do this, it isn't censorship.

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BlueTan85 said:

I do not want my posts moved. I am deleting them.

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Well that's self-censorship and you removing my explanation at the beginning of this thread was real censorship.....

BlueTan85 said:

I do not want my posts moved. I am deleting them.

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The reason the forums exist is so that people can communicate. You got very upset that the moderators, in an attempt to facilitate this communication, chose to move some of your posts. You felt they were restricting communication. I believe you called it censorship. So your response to that was to delete your original postings? What purpose did that serve, beyond further obstructing communication, possibly violating the terms of the forum's usage policies (I'm not up on them, but editing to completely change the meaning in an antagonistic manner may be a violation, since it's not editing for clarity or to fix a typo) and essentially announcing to everyone that you were just throwing one big temper tantrum? You can either be for open communication or against it, but you can't have it both ways.

Before you did this I disagreed with you, but I respected you for having strong feelings about what you viewed as censorship. Deleting your own posts in an attempt to make those that posted in response look foolish caused me to lose that respect. If that was your goal, you have accomplished it.