This morning, I noticed a thread in General Questions, “How do I become gay?” and opened it. Before I had a chance to start reading, I clicked another web site to look up some information, thinking I could use the Back button to get back to the Dope when I had the chance. I went away and did some other things.
When I returned and went back to the thread, I got an error message that the SDMB could not find that page or something. I looked in all the other forums, but it was nowhere to be found. I used the Search function, but there was neither hide nor hair of this thread. Very odd. I have never seen a thread deleted before (except in the Great Thread Mass Extinction of February 1992, but that was a consequence of the whole board going down; it wasn’t like this at all).
Did anyone else notice this thread during its brief existence, or was I hallucinating it?
I’ve seen it twice so far in the past week or so. Threads involving spam-type links, both of them. I guess it’s easier to delete them than break the link and close the thread.
You’d be surprised at the Awesome Moderator Powers.
There’s something called a “mass prune” that I’ve never had the guts to investigate, over on the Pizza Parlor (which runs on the same software) where I’m a Mod. The idea scares me! :eek:
You can delete a whole thread, any given post in a thread except the OP (unfortunately, deleting it deletes the thread as a whole), merge two threads into one (with sometimes-peculiar results), move threads with or without redirect tags left behind, move entire forums (not particularly valuable here, but useful where there are cascading groups of forums on other boards)…
If it can be done, vBB equips Moderators and Admins. with the powers to do it.
(BTW, something fascinating – it’s quite possible to give a single user or a group of users permissions to post in only one or selected forums. I don’t offhand have a clue why anybody might want to do that on any board I frequent, but it’s an interesting gimmick. It’s also possible to create a forum that nobody – Admins. included – has access to. Again why you might want one is beyond me, but vBB appears to be amazingly flexible!
The thread in question was started by a returning troll, so one of the mods removed it. Usually, when you see a thread disappear like that, it’s because a troll started it.
Just curious, post counts don’t mean much to me, but if you had posted to a deleted link, does your post count go down by however many posts you made pre-deletion?