[ube]

Didn't know about this flag - thanks for pointing it out. As for the post - doesn't seem offensive at all.

PG: Hacker News improvement suggestion: for any post that gets deleted - show the username of the one who deleted it so when "showdead" is set to "yes" it shows this. An explanation would also be a nice thing to have as part of this mechanism. I'm going on the assumption that you follow Guido's BDFL model.

[ErrantX]

> show the username of the one who deleted

I have no evidence for this but I think there is a policy of the mods not discussing a) that they are mods and b) their reasoning etc.

I kinda agree; many forums end up degrading into arguments about which mod did what and for why.

EDIT: possible happy medium - a text field where a mod can jot down why it was killed...

[ube]

Well - if we take a big leap here and assume that one of WakeMate's founders is a mod and this person deleted the post then the policy is not so good.

A possible approach is to allow the mods to have aliases to their usernames (and PG and company can be the only ones knowing the correspondence of alias to username). This way - HN users could see the history of deletions of a particular mod without knowing the actual user.

Granted, HN users are smart and someone could probably create a data mining app which would find the actual user by looking at pattern of deletions, topics of posts, etc... but that's life and that's what you get for having a lovely place such as HN.

[jrockway]

Maybe an irrelevant data point, but I am in the top 10 users karma-wise, and I have never heard anything about being a mod. So it must be the super-secret elite that get to be mods.