I'm sorry, Shambles. Sometimes, you make sense, but not today. I can't figure out what it is you're saying or what you're accusing us of now.

volunteers are so empowered and do in fact delete another poster's contribution without any prior or any other approval and without Joe's knowledge

As I've explained many times before, we do not require Clones to obtain prior approval of an editorial action. That wouldn't make any sense at all. We want the Clones to act quickly if there is a serious problem post that needs to be dealt with immediately, and then report their action to us. Mostly, the immediate problems that fall under this limited permission are severe personal attacks, racism, and Spam - stuff that's really obvious. If they had to get approval first then it would make more sense to leave all editing to the Mudcat Troika - and Max, Jeff, and I simply don't have time to be here every minute of every day. Ted's deleted 200th post slipped by me because Mudcat was having technical problems at the time, and my edit review tools weren't working. That post should not have been deleted.

Meanwhile under the cloak of protecting us from abusive personal attacks changes are routinely being imposed upon the contributions of posters looking for information – without their permission or knowledge - by anonymous volunteers.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. Yes, we do routinely add clarifying words to thread titles, usually leaving the main part of the original title intact - in an attempt to help posters obtain information by making the title of their request more specific. Long experience has taught us that threads titled "Desperately seeking lyrics" get little response. But those thread title changes have nothing whatsoever to do with "abusive personal attacks."

And I have no idea what the anti-Semitism thread has to do with this one, except that Martin Gibson has been acting up there, as he sometimes does. All I can say is that we're working on him.

-Joe Offer-