I recently responded on the thread "Considering Quitting".
The content of my post, which might have been classed as "blunt", was not in any way offensive.
Yet I found my post had been deleted as "Innapropriate content" by a moderator, without any word of explanation.

I want to know which moderator it was and why they took this action without even a note to myself explaning why.

I am absolutely furious.
What kind of forum is this?

Looks like petty dictatorship to me.

Go ahead.........delete this one.....show your true colours.

Hi Aberdeenangus

I agree with you on this one, its most annoying.  The one thing I enjoy about this site - apart from sharing joys and woe's with fellow phders -is that you get lots of different perspectives on the one post, all the opinions are important, and it helps you to look at a problem from another angle; also it makes it more interesting when you get a debate going and people disagree - just look at the number of viewings and postings, as long as its not as you say offensive, nothing wrong with sharing your own opinion even if its blunt. And in the words of Karl Popper (enjoying his philosophy at the mo) no one can possibly give us more service than showing us what is wrong with what we think or do, and the bigger the fault, the bigger the improvement made possible by its revelation; we must learn to welcome criticism as only through criticism can knowledge advance.

Thanks for that.

As this is a post-grad forum, I think it safe to assume that the users are adults, and reasonably intelligent.
I find it pretty dire that some 'moderator' thinks fit to act as an emotional filter on our behalf.

I think that moderators that censor posts simply because they do not agree with the sentiments expressed should consider whether they are fit to continue in the role !

I shall be asking that the Administrator of the forum look into this.

I never flagged you to the mods, but I did find your reply plain rude and wrote a scathing reply until I realised I couldn't be bothered getting into a flame war. I feel it was justified.

Guitarman
My post wasn't aimed at you.
Sorry if my post caused you offence. I certainly didn't mean to.
Your post struck a chord with me in fact, because I did leave engineering to join the police !

My post was aimed at the original post who made my taxpaying blood boil.

Yes it's something that I dislike about this forum. And I can't help but find it rather ironic that this is meant to be a forum for academics, where surely the idea is discussion, voicing views, debating them, being challenged on them, back them up etc etc. I am far more active, and a moderator, on another forum about something so much more trivial, where we respect freedom of speech, unless the circumstances are extreme. Even then we do not delete posts, although people can be reprimanded.

I've not read what the OP said, and for all I know it could have been as blunt as anything, but give people the rope to hang themselves not censor them.

My particular censorship gripe is if you mention jobs.ac.uk is response to someone's question. We are only allowed to recommend findaphd.com, not jobs.ac.uk which looks to me to be set up not for profit by universities themselves. No, even if its a social science/arts/anything not science query, people have to be sent to the search engine which puts Arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law in one category, whilst splitting science into about 6 categories. The other forum I am in is also run by a private business, but we do not censor out the competition.

There must be a PhD in this ;-)

I posted recently with a genuine issue but after some valid discussion posters went off on a tangent and posts started to become 'inappropriate', or at least that's what appeared to happen. I had e-mails saying there had been more replies to my original post but when I came on to the forum the whole post had been deleted. I can understand that some of the discussion had perhaps started to become offensive but there had been some genuine replies to my original question. However, I can't read those now, and there was no explanation of why the whole post had gone.

======= Date Modified 19 Aug 2009 10:21:27 =======
Hey guys,

To be fair the T&C's do state:

Posts which:

* contain personal insults
* are purposelessly inflammatory
* can be interpreted as advertising or spamming
* advertise postgraduate courses, PhD places, Postdoctoral or other academic positions
* or are otherwise deemed inappropriate by the Postgraduate Forum

will be removed.

Theres nothing worse than people provoking an unnecessary reaction which ends up steering the topic away from its original point.


Also, jobs.ac.uk is profit making, its just based at a university (hense gaining the ac.uk suffix)

======= Date Modified 19 Aug 2009 10:27:59 =======
I agree moderation seems to have been rather quick off the mark and a bit OTT in the past few weeks. I noticed Pam's thread had disappeared and wondered what the hell had happened to it, then an innocuous thread about a teaching career went too, presumably because of a single post that several people found to be too offensive to remain on here. Personally I would rather posters were challenged by others and some type of discussion ensued, remaining there for others to read. A while back when posters were downright rude (rather than blunt) other posters said something and it virtually moderated itself. I thought that worked ok. It is a commercial forum, however...

======= Date Modified 19 Aug 2009 10:57:11 =======
======= Date Modified 19 Aug 2009 10:56:01 =======
I second the opinions expressed.

well, but then surely every reference to google even is advertising, since that's a profit-making company too? I find it quite strange that references to job search engines or similar sites are considered advertising, I think that's far too wide a definition. But then what about links to newspaper articles etc? Surely newspapers are commercial businesses too, yet I didn't notice posts/threads containing such links or references being removed...
So the definition of what references count as advertising doesn't only seem too wide, but also rather biased and one-sided...

======= Date Modified 19 Aug 2009 11:00:56 =======
But would Google allow Yahoo to advertise on their site?

======= Date Modified 19 Aug 2009 11:26:48 =======

I have fallen foul of this too, but in mentioning a different site. Whilst I can understand that they have a business to run, I did feel a bit put out as:
1. I mentioned the site in question because it performs a different function to findaphd.com (by listing funding from small charitable trusts etc rather than just PhD studentships)
2. I really don't think this constitutes advertising - I have zero to gain from it.
3. All I was trying to do was help someone, and being modded makes you feel like you've been naughty.

Please see your private messages! :)

I agree with that. I don't think all sites should be modded. Theres a fine line sometimes I suppose

We'll leave you to the advertising debate, but I'm afraid those are the rules we've chosen to stick by and we make no secret of it.  We realise it's not a perfect system, but our users are clever enough to use Google and find our competitors themselves.  The good people at jobs.ac would be offended at the insinuation that they don't make a profit.

PamW - Sorry that your thread disappeared as it did contain some interesting replies.  I'm afraid the rather bizarre flame war of personal insults that ensued from it overnight between some of the people who replied left us with little choice but to remove the entire thread to prevent it from starting again. We should have sent you a PM to explain why - this was an oversight on our part.

Aberdeenangus - Your message was removed because we felt it was unnecessarily inflammatory.  You could have made your points in a less blunt way and you are still free to post to thread concerned.  It is a matter of tone.

We aim to keep discussion on the forum polite, informative and constructive.  This is a fine balance and we don't always get it right. There are plenty of places on the internet where you can express your views in as strong terms as you wish, but this site isn't one of them.