I asked The Colonel if he would like to write op/ed essays for LIB. He said yes. After the first couple, he asked if I could give him editing power on his articles so he could continue to hone his writing or make a change to something he wrote. I did that.
Unknowingly along with the editing power, I had given him rule over the comments that appeared on his post.
AL e-mailed me that his comments were disappearing.
The Colonel admitted that he had been deleting comments.
I never have and never will (on purpose) give ANYONE ELSE THE RIGHT TO DELETE COMMENTS on this site.
As a rule I don’t delete a comment unless-
1. It is a racial slur
2. It is threatening
3. It uses a real name that isn’t in the public eye.
4. It is totally unrelated to the thread AND is just name calling.
5. It is a new poster who is flooding the board.
The Colonel knows that I wouldn’t want him to delete comments without asking me, but he did it anyway. (Kind of like he offered Big Dick Daddy a job writing for LIB, without asking me, I’m only the owner.) I believe The Colonel’s intentions were good, but his actions were that of someone who thought he could do a better job at running LIB, than I do. And he still believes that. Everyone has a right to their opinion. They also have a right to have their OWN website. The Colonel overstepped his boundaries.
The Colonel claims that there is a problem with my moderation because I let the thread on his post go wild with responses from people who didn’t agree with him. The anger from those people came from his deleting comments. If he hadn’t deleted comments, the explosion never would have occurred. I purposely let the thread go crazy because I wanted it to play itself out and allow everyone the chance to say what they wanted to, without their comments being deleted.
I like the Colonel and would like him to continue to write essays for the site if he would like to. But no one will ever have editing power again, because I can’t separate that from the power to delete comments, and my trust that someone wouldn’t do more then we agreed they could, has been broken.
Jeremy, as to making "the right choice", I have no choice to make. I’m not deciding whether The Colonel should continue to write for LIB. That’s his choice.
As far as AL goes, he did nothing wrong. He alerted me that his comments were being deleted. He got mad about it, and wrote about his anger. He did nothing to anyone that The Colonel has not done to others and to AL.
AL is a good guy, a smart guy, a nice guy, and if you don’t like his essays, don’t read them. I happen to think they are excellent and that is why I post them.
To the General- I know for sure that two of your comments were deleted, and NOT by The Colonel. WordPress has a variety of rules and limits and they are more strict for new posters (which you became when you signed up with a new name). Two LONG comments that you sent in were automatically put in the spam folder. This was either because you sent a lot of comments in a row and/or those two comments exceeded the word limit allowed. When I tried to remove them from Spam and send them to the board they turned red and disappeared. So you can blame that on me, on WordPress, or on your propensity to be verbous. But those comments were not deleted on purpose, nor were they deleted by The Colonel.
I think I deserve a drink now. If I didn’t love this site and you guys……
But you do make me laugh, everyday, and that’s worth a lot to me these days.
xoxo,
Cindi aka NL aka The Warden