so a user named “beats2014” posted a thread in GQ about “breaking in” headphones. I initially reported the thread as possible spam setup, with the caveat that it was a legitimate question. it did end up spawning a reasonably well-thought out discussion, but now it seems to have been deleted. meanwhile the same user posted another thread (confirming he/she is a spammer) which samclem happily moved from GQ to IMHO. I’m a bit pissed off that a thread containing useful discussion was just nuked from orbit, especially when (presumably) another moderator just moves another of the same user’s threads. Wouldn’t it have made more sense just to deal with the OP instead of taking people’s input and chucking it in the trash?
From the current thread.
Better than a horse with no name.
No, it wasn’t “almost the same name,” it was the same OP.
You’re right, I thought it was a new poster because he only had one post.
I read your initial report and at that point decided it was possibly a legit poster/thread. I didn’t revisit the thread until reading this one just now. Colibri was on top of it last night around 10PM when the shills started showing up. He moved the thread out of sight and started banning. I moved that second thread without realizing it was the same guy. I was tired. He’s gone now.
I sympathize with your wishing to have the good info about headphones remain. I’ll see what I can do about restoring the good posts. Might take me a bit of time.
its not that big a deal, I shouldn’t have said “pissed” when I was little more than “irked.”
though I’ve seen you’ve restored it, so thank you 
Dammit, samclem, stop being so reasonable. You’ll set expectations.
Huh? vBulletin has undelete?
I don’t know what technical capabilities the SDMB has, or what internal policies are. But on an entirely unrelated board where I do have knowledge of behind-the-scenes operations, we learned (through painful experience) never to delete anything. We maintained a hidden “trash” or “limbo” location to hurl threads into, from which they could be restored if errors occurred or decisions were second-guessed.
They do have such a mods-only forum here. I’d love to see general (read-only!) access given to the thing for us peons some day (perhaps April Fools?).
Most of it’s not that interesting, believe it or not – mostly housekeeping stuff (a crazy long thread of spammer names, email addresses, IPs). The real juicy stuff happens in the mod loop, which we do via email.
Oh, and yeah, we usually just move stuff to the mod forum rather than doing hard deletes.
Great job, sam. I hated to delete the thread because there was some good info there, but there were three socks of the same spammer (who was also the OP) all complimenting each other about how great their spam was and I figured it would be a real mess to try vaporize them while still having the good posts make sense. That must have been a bit of work.
Ha! I was actually looking for that thread myself because I thought it had a lot of good info in it, despite the spam.
That’s what they [del]pay[/del] me to do. 
I never thought of spam having support socks. Makes sense, of course. Companies and authors post “reviews” of themselves all the time.
Not all sock puppets are spammers, but all spammers are sock puppets? This is a real question, since the topic is a central one and I’d like to know more watching mods in kill mode.