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We don't really delete anything. It's hidden from normal viewing, in this case because it was another off-topic explanation about why this member's speculation should be allowed in a mainstream thread when he'd already received a couple of modnotes asking him not to. It was done as an alternative to suspending him, to show him that arguing modnotes in thread was going to get him nowhere. He had been told how to deal with his grievance and ignored it so his next attempt was deleted. And now you've come along and made an entire thread about it, when as a long-time member you should know that our process is as fair as we can make it. I understand you have very little trust in our moderation and suspect us of all kinds of foul deceit and censorship because we're all just closet dictators and the owners of the site are completely blind and have no idea what's going on with our evil cabal. We really appreciate you keeping us honest and looking out for the rights of the other members. You are a beacon of decency and we really don't deserve to have you. Thanks for policing us evildoers. Next time we'll just suspend the perpetrator and forget trying a more nuanced approach.

OK, I concede this would be more appropriate. Some might argue that a single mod was abusing his power and hiding behind a collective account. I don't see this solving any perceived problems. We use our personal accounts because it's important that a mod who is involved in a thread doesn't try to moderate in that thread. If I post a modnote, it should be clear that I have no vested interest and as little bias as possible with regard to that thread. I recommend you smiley when you say something like that.

As a simple member of this forum, what I would accept is: "We deleted your post"' I propose the following: create a new account called "moderators staff" and use this one when you want to delete someone's post. Then it will be clear that it not the act of any Imatfaul or other, but the result of some concertation between the staff members, a collegial work. And why is Imat hiding behind the protection of other mods. Is he too young and feable to defend himself?

Michel - It's a privately owned site and you agreed to certain things when you created your account here. It's really that simple. The mods and admins could replace every post you ever make with a picture of handicapped toddlers licking dog dicks in a horse barn if they really wanted to do so (they obviously wouldn't, but the point is that they can do any damned thing they want to your posts because these are not "your posts," but instead content that belongs to the forum). Your recourse is to accept that sometimes content will be removed for reasons the staff deems appropriate, or alternatively to just go away and not post here anymore. There really isn't a lot of room in between those two options, so you have to choose. Said another way... If it is truly "unacceptable," then you can stop accepting it.

Not sure where you saw this, but there are only a few situations where this is ever warranted. We'll delete a post if it's extremely offensive and might cause parents of younger members to take away SFN as a learning resource. We'll delete a post rather than suspend someone if they continue to argue against modnotes instead of following the instructions we give them to report the modnote post and let another staff member take care of it without further derailing a thread. We'll delete a post if it's strictly advertising another thread that person is trying to drive traffic to. Other than that, of course we delete obvious spam. What post are you referring to?

Not sure why you want to delete all the notifications -- it marks them as read once you've seen them, so you can ignore them -- but I think the only way to nuke them for sure is just to run an SQL query.

I have 84 pages of notifications, I don't want to eat them all page by page, is there a delete all anywhere that anyone has seen?

Test of hyperlinking It's different from before but just as useful. You can unlink by using the broken chain-link in the next tot he right icon - did we have that before; I do remember getting horribly messed up with links I was trying to delete.

That's really not a bad idea, new members would be at a disadvantage but it would also help make them more aware of the rep system and it's impact. If neg rep impacted on your own rep it might keep people from frivolously giving neg rep. Giving out neg rep should be something you give some thought to, making it impact on the giver seems like a good way to do it. of course giving neg rep when you have no pos rep "in the bank" should result in you receiving neg rep in your account as well, kinda like being over drawn.... I have to admit there have been a few threads that would have tempted me to exhaust my account...

I agree. The member receiving the neg rep should know where the hit came from, and the one giving the neg rep should wear responsibility for this. I have another crazy proposal: The neg rep that you give could come from the reservoir of pos rep of the giving member. You positive reputation is then like a bank account from which you can spend neg rep as payment. Rep point becomes an exchange unit (like money). only members with lot of "money" would dare to spend their "money": only valuable members would spend their rep points. What do you think?

At the top right of the screen near our avatar and user name is a drop-down menu showing notifications... For example, when someone has quoted a post from us. When clicking the link underlying the word "quoted," it should bring the user to the actual post that was put forth in response to our own. Now, it just loads the most recent post in that thread. It seems that the part of the URL that identifies the specific post number is failing. It's no longer taking us to the post referenced. This worked properly until very recently. Can the functionality be restored (or is the issue of no longer loading the specific post specific to my account/profile somehow)?

Does this mean i have to delete the 57 sock puppet accounts I am currently running? 57 channels and nothing on

Post count wouldn't matter. Which I now see is a fatal flaw. Your rep in the last week / rep given in the last week You'd need some logic to take account if rep given in the last week was 0...

I have no previous account on this site, and if I created multiple accounts I would change the ip address every time, so you wouldn't be able to match them up with any existing account. I can prove this to you if you want, I can make another account with a different ip address and pm you, assuming you'd let me break the rules to do it. There's point #1, and not only that but if I got banned I should theoretically be able to unban myself using a slightly different method, so I don't think would ever have that problem unless the account itself got deleted. How about this: Any staff member, ban me right now, I'll see if my theory on unbanning will work. If it does, I have some evidence for my case, if not I don't care and I'll stop bothering you, I have 4 other places that I debate random things in-between assignments.

I have pointed out that you do the following: 1. Insist, without room for doubt, that every one of your views is correct. 2. Accuse those of differing views of such things as lack of integrity, dishonesty, distaste for freedom. 3. Present interpretations of history that you assert are facts. 4. Demand that we accept these 'facts'. There are other behaviours, but those are the principle ones. In my experience only two conditions account for such behaviour: gross stupidity and hatred. Your posts are well written and intelligently structured, so I rule out stupidity and am left with hate. If you feel there is another motive, not for arguing your case - we all get that - but for the related behaviours noted above I am certainly willing to listen to an explanation. This appears to be an attempt at that alternative explanation. You seem to be arguing that virtue accords one with the strength and confidence of being right. You then go on to try to demonstrate how virtuous you are. Athena, what you call virtuous strength appears to me like arrogant self righteousness. I always entertain the possibility I may be wrong. You, apparently, don't suffer from that weakness. You say you attempt to follow these three rules. Here would be my three equivalents: 1. I accord respect from the outset, until someone demonstrates they are not worthy of that respect. Then I give them a second chance. And a third. 2. I will not knowingly damage the dignity of others. But if they wish to self harm and call it noble that's their choice. (It's part of freedom, you know.) 3. I'm reasonably sure Hitler felt his integrity was intact up until the end, so I don't set much store my self identified integrity. You might argue that I have qualified integrity with the words self-identified. You might argue that we can determine actions that reflect integrity via guidance from others. However, this does not seem to apply to you, since - as noted - you have refused to listen to anything anyone has said about your own integrity in this thread. Your indulgent self-righteouness, determination to ignore others who act with integrity and conviction, these things do not speak of love. You may love democracy and human rights. You really don't seem to keen on people.

We have clear rules about what belongs where. Here's a link to what goes into speculations. Censorship would be to delete it. We don't delete it. We don't suppress it. We just categorize it. Note that if you follow the rules of the Speculations forum, your average tinfoil hat junk does not belong there. It might at first end up there by accident (or because we're a friendly bunch of mods), but we have a trashcan for the really bad stuff. Thank you for your suggestion.

! Moderator Note Let's hope that now being able to ignore one's nemesis is a satisfactory solution. And to anyone else reading this, please don't EVER go through and delete whole posts from any thread you've been in. Take the time to post things you're proud of. Since there is no further reason for this to be open, I'll close it now.

Because you forget to login! Or, maybe because you don't even have an account? Or, perhaps your keyboard is not plugged in? Or, maybe your laptop ran out of battery? Or, maybe your mother told you to do your homework instead of surfing the internet? Really, there could be many reasons. Maybe you can give a little more information what is going wrong?

That's not quite right. I wasn' concerned about his actions. That was taken care of in the other forum. I asked the following question and after presenting the example I inquired And that is the essenf this thread. And I've been nothing except very polite' date=' reasonalble and logical in all my reponses and inquiries. The example is completely anonymous. Both the name of the person and the name of the forum is kept a secret so as to esure that this doesn't get at all personal. In fact when someone, who also frequents that forum, mentioned his name I promptly asked then to delete the name from their post, and then were kind enough to do so. This is [i']purely[/i] an intellectual exercise. That's correct. But to be precise, he said or in short You're out to get me. To me, when someone says You're out to get me its an attack on my character. His response had nothing to due with my original argument, i.e. him that a particle with rest mass can't move at the speed of light. In the course of this discussion I gained a precise knowledge of what an ad hominem is and as such I now know that it was a personal attack aka ad hominem. I quickly deleted that comment so I will not discuss it. I later said that I his comment expresses frustration since the purpose of the comment Oh, for crying out loud. is to express frustration. I even looked it up just to make sure. And I gave that link - http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_crying_out_loud Its not a subjecctive comment but an objective one. Nope. Its not an attack when there's no question that its frustration. swansont will probanbly agree that he was frustrated, hence his remark. That can't be used as a premise to claim that my observation of that was an attack on his person. In essence all I said was Why are you impatient which I changed to Why are you frustrated?. Those aren't attacks on a person by any means. Please don't take this conversation into a negative mode. There's just no call for that kind of thing here. The purpose of this thread was to distinguish whether something was an ad hominem or not. I just happened to use a real life example. The persons name and the forum's name was intentionally left out of this thread so as to keep it a secret. This has nothing to do with that person or that forum but merely the definition and example of ad hominem. Before this thread I wasn't 100% clear on what an ad honinem was. Now I cleary know all about them. The rest of my responses were answers to questions posed of me and commenting on others responses. This is an exercise in an intellectual analysis of a particular part of cogent arguments. In particular its an analysis of the fallacy known as the personal attack aka ad hominem. I've been quite polite and logical throughout this thread, avoing negative deviations from the main topic. I've been reading the book Practical Logic: An Antidote for Uncritical Thinking. Its part of my study of critical thinking and constructing cogent arguements and recogning logical fallacies. The personal attack which I used as an example was just that, an example. I created another thread as a continuation of this study. The name of that thread is Critical Thinking Skills.

Please don't put words into my mouth. The thought of "picking on me" never entered my mind. Btw, I made a mistake. Oh, for crying out loud is not an attack, its meant to show the emotion of either frustration, exasperation, or annoyance. See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for_crying_out_loud. In any case I deleted that comment because I thought that it was unwarrented. Sometimes we all say things we regret later. I've decided to delete those things when I can so as to be as polite as I can. I imagine that's fine with you? That's correct. They are. And yo used it wronig. The only way I Can see to resolve any misunderstanding with the definition is to realize that a personal attack is not simply not an attack on a person. They are not the same thing. That's clear from the definition. Note: I've already said I'm done with ad hominems so I won't adress them again with you. I believe that you and have already paved that road.

Aethelwulf - Up until this point no names have been used. I didn't want this to be an attack on a person who isn't here to defend themsleves. That would be bringing a fight from that forum to this forum and that's the furthest thing fro my mind. CAn you do me a favor? Please edit your post and delete that name. Thank you.

I often run across posts where someone has written "Cancel" or "Oooops" or "Nevermind". I soft-delete them, which removes them from the sight of everyone but the staff. We never fully delete anything. I'll reinforce what swansont said about abuse as well. When we had greater editing capabilities available, we had members who got angry at something someone said and went back and deleted all their posts. It left many threads completely incomprehensible, except where they were actually quoted.

The flip side to this is that there are people who will post something outrageous or full of nonsense, and then go back and change or delete the post and try to play the innocent, which is a nightmare from a moderation standpoint. It used to be that the ability to edit expired after a few hours, so that changing the post could not happen. For my own part, even though as a moderator I can do this, if it's more than a typo and not noticed during a proof-read right after I post, I use the strike-out function. There's also the view that having the reality that you can't put the genie back in the bottle might make people weigh their words a little more carefully.

I know you should "look before you leap" or think first, act later. However if I do something rashly then I'm sure others do too. Sometimes I post a reply and then wish I hadn't. Perhaps I quickly realise that I have misunderstood some-one else's post or that my reply is inappropriate in some way. If the "edit" facility is still available I can change the wording of my post - but I can't delete the whole post. Since I have to post something I end up, perhaps, posting an apology. Would it be a good idea to allow use of the "edit" facility to cancel completely a whole post? Example from one of my posts - "Changed my mind - might come back"

Morality - Philosophy www.allaboutphilosophy.org/morality.htmWithout these principles in place, societies cannot survive for long. In today's world, morality is frequently thought of as belonging to a particular religious point of ... The Definition of Morality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/Mar 14, 2011 – A society whose morality contains all three of these features may be criticized by philosophers that accept a normative account of morality if in ... 1. Descriptive Definitions of ... - 2. Normative Definitions of ... - Bibliography Philosophy, Morality and Society www.open.edu.au › Home › Courses & units › Arts & humanitiesPhilosophy, Morality and Society is a Arts & humanities undergraduate level 1 unit offered by Macquarie University through Open Universities Australia. Philosophy, et cetera: Society and Morality www.philosophyetc.net/2005/07/society-and-morality.htmlJul 9, 2005 – Many people claim that morality is defined in terms of the beliefs that are widely accepted in a society. Thus Melbourne Philosopher, for ... Philosophy, Morality and Society - PHL132 - 2012 Course ... www.handbook.mq.edu.au › Handbook HomeApr 20, 2011 – Philosophy, Morality and Society - PHL132. This unit provides an introduction to major topics in ethics, moral theory and contemporary political ... Now how do you justify moving my philosophical comment about morality to religion?