PitBull,
I've watched with interest as this developed. I was in the office at the time the original thread developed, and am quite active in the day-to-day maintenence of the site, even if I do not post all too often.
A lot of people seem to get bent out of shape when their messages are removed, and more often than not think we TBN admins (and now moderators) are "picking" on them, or "signaling" them out. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As you stated, the original post asked why Harv's "edit" mark was left there. A bit later Muhammad makes a rather simple remark that there are 7 other moderators. bcoleman asks if it's public or private, no problem.
Truth is, we spotted your original post as something that we should have handled last week, if not sooner! Muhammad and I discussed it and decided that posting a simple News post would be enough. Before then, we had discussed whether or not we wanted to make it part of the FAQ, a simple text link at the top of a forum where a moderator moderates, or a spot on the main site.
But it seems we started running before we put on our shoes. So we spotted that you wanted to know, and Muhammad made the short response while preparing the longer post to the News forum.
As some of you are aware, we were setting up the hat sales, ordering them, putting in the e-commerce engine on our other domain, ordering the SSL Certificate. But we had selected the moderators ealier. Briefed them, and set them loose. We keep a close eye on them, but announcing it was something that got lost in the shuffle.
Back to the removed posts. pbenven posted a "testy" reply about the publicity of moderators, and insinuated that we were hiding the list of moderators and because PitBull noticed Harv edited something, we were "forced" to tell everyone about it.
This was false for several reasons, as Muhammad stated. First, all edits by Moderators are always shown, and there is no way Harv or any of the other moderators could hide that if they wanted to. Second, there is no reason that we would have wanted to keep this hidden. Our reason for not announcing earlier is truly being overworked.
But Muhammad replied to pbenven again, saying we weren't hiding anything, posts were always shown. Then PitBull replies, saying the list should be posted in his humble opinion (I agree, as does Muhammad.)
And Muhammad replies again, explaining all that I just explained about why the list wasn't put out earlier.
This would have been fine if it had stayed, and then pbenven replies again, saying the situation could have been handled with more tact (which is true, but which we can't fix, since the past is behind us) and then asks who owns the site. Or who "controls" the site.
At that point, Muhammad and I decided that this entire thread was going no where, and these snipes at us and TBN's ownership would only lead to more and end up with hurt feelings on both sides. Muhammad's post to the News site was up, and there was nothing being said in that previous thread that was not covered in the News post. Plus it was in the wrong forum, so we decided to remove it.
I should note that the word "testy" is not mine, but pbenven's own choice of word for his response. Arguably, you could have kept the entire exchange and left it open for others to reply to, and read. But it has been our experience that once you start down a path, the entire thread can quickly deteriorate, and that thread was already starting. If you've ever watched Star Wars, you may be familiar with the phrase that the wise Jedi Master Yoda tells his student Luke: "Once you start down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny."
And so, we simply step in sometimes and remove threads, or parts of threads, to keep everyone on the light-side of the force, so to speak.
In closing, It would be a dream if we never had to do this sort of moderation, but unfortunately it is required to keep the entire forum a useful tool to the compact tractor owner/newbie/dealer/buyer, and a friendly place where everyone can talk about similar interests.
I hope the bitter taste in pbenven's mouth is gone away now, and he'll realize it was just a harmless case of bad timing and perhaps a misunderstanding, and we didn't mean to offend him or even make him feel put out.. And I'm sure you, PitBull, won't hold it against us if we got a little backlogged on work and forgot to do something (even if it was a fairly critical thing to do.)
Thanks for reading (my 21st post),
-Ibrahim
