the thread's originator had no such rights or no more rights than any of the rest of the contributors

In other words, any other poster on that thread could have asked as well, if they'd had a similarly good reason to present to Joe.

Despite the fact that the Chief of the Mudcat Editing Team has recently and publicly called me a buffoon - to add to idiot, looney, asshole etc and that two of our known moderators have publicly stated that I should be banned from our forum?

Since you've recently, publicly and repeatedly (for the last however many months) called them all incompetent and biased, and you've made it clear that you don't want to be a member of the Mudcat whilst they're delegated by Max to do the day-to-day running, frankly I don't blame them for losing their patience in the end.

If your good reason is just "I posted this, therefore no-one else has the right to alter it, and Max wouldn't have done it back in 1999", then I reckon we can all predict Joe's answer.

And our forum will of course be expected to believe that this will not be a personally motivated decision in any way?

As I said, if you expect anyone on Mudcat to believe that you've not been given the freedom to speak your mind for the last however many months, then you're completely off your rocker. Do we know what your views are on this? Of course we do. So tell us how we'd know if you hadn't been given the freedom to keep posting the same thing, day after day for months?

Graham.