After 6 years, you should be able to come up with a better thought-out suggestion than that, Shambles.

My concern is not with the dirty bathwater but to ensure that the baby is not thrown out with it.

Spam (when it is not intentionally posted to threads by the current Chief of the Mudcat Editing Team) is not usually a conventional contribution from a poster. Who will have feelings to be hurt and may also become angry (just like the current Chief of the Mudcat Editing Team).

Most automatically generated spam is usually automatically deleted before most us see it. So what happens to the little spam that slips past - should perhaps not concern our forum to the extent that it is currently encouraged to be seen to?

It should certainly not be used as an excuse and justification to treat invited contributions from posters as if they were also automatically generated.

When any invited contributed is posted - I suggest that the poster should at least always be made aware in an editing comment that their post has been judged by our 'moderators' to require some form of imposed censorship.

'Silent deletion' is perhaps accepable for automatically generated spam and for conventional posts in the few very extreme cases.

But I suggest that it is not perhaps the proportionate first and only response for all the other cases? Where is seems to be overlooked that such drastic treatment will result in (possibly an equally drastic) reaction?

Any poster who cannot find their contribution - should perhaps know if the reason is that it has been subject to imposed censorship?

For if posters do not see an editing comment to that effect - they will have no reason to become paranoid or defensive and can then consider other reasons for their post's non-appearance.