[ysbel]

mrsbugman,

What Elspeth and Empress are trying to tell you politely is that if you don't want to be singled out in the open threads, its best if you don't single out a moderator by name who has been deleting your posts. You complained about a specific moderator Humera on the open forum and moderators don't like being singled out either.

It does hurt a moderator's ability to do her job in the forums if a member calls her by name as one who is unfairly deleting posts. If the complaint doesn't get researched and the results published on the open forums in the thread where the moderators name was mentioned, that can hurt a moderator's reputation in her forums.

You made the question, fair enough, but then since you named a moderator, the response to your question and the details had to be made in the same public thread in order to protect Humera's reputation as a moderator with the general public.

Now the problem that you mentioned, the difficulty of searching for items in a forum, we are well aware of and unfortunately there is nothing we can do at the moment other than what we're doing. We get so many newcomers that all have the same questions that we're trying to develop FAQs in the forums to make the answers easier to find. But once you have the answer to the question and you want to talk about something else, it is annoying to see the same question pop up in different threads and in new threads all at the same time. If we didn't delete these posts and threads we'd get complaints from our more established members why we were letting the same basic questions take over the forum again, again and again.

We're trying to accommodate both the newcomers and the members who have been around awhile and don't want to repeat the same old things but its not easy so please be a little patient and as Empress said, we know this is a problem so if you pm a moderator we can help you find the answer to your question more quickly if its on the forum. Now if you find a forum where you think the answers to some basic questions are really hard to find, you can offer to help the moderating team in that forum by finding links for posts that have the answers to some more commonly asked questions in the forums and sending them to the mod team so that they can put together an FAQ thread. The moderating teams are quite stretched as it is so I'm sure any mod team would appreciate any member offering to help us with a bit of legwork to find the answers to all these basic questions that a forum might have. But you indicated that you didn't have time to search for one answer to a question so I don't know whether you'd have time to search for the answers to all the questions that would make up an FAQ. Quite frankly, its a time-consuming job for anybody which is why we don't have as many FAQ threads in the forums as we'd like.

That's all I can tell you for now.