I realize in the use of the word "censorship" that I'm using a hot-button. When I philosophize, I usually try to choose words that are as far from euphemism as possible, so others reading the material (as well as myself) will really think about the concepts and truths involved. But understand that I'm not using "censorship" as a pejorative.

A moderator is a censor; the two words are synonymous. In any message board, the quality of the moderation is determined by three factors, the policies of the board and its administrator, the sophistication of the tools, and the nature of the moderator. When there is a reasonable degree of quality in each of those three factors, the board serves its members, as well as the curious public, well. When any of those factors doesn't measure up, the result is censorship in its most negative capacity.

My original post in response to Mary Anne was to point out how some of the regulars use their generously broadcast flaming spears in an attempt to dismiss certain topics out of hand. I've seen a few things land in Flame simply because one or a few posters were so nasty that a majority of the posts were negative, despite the legitimacy of the original topic. I've also seen a much greater number of threads that became very cumbersome to read, and thus lost the general interest, because they had been hijacked by flames and statements of personal agenda (which are, upon examination, the same debate tactic with different language).

I tend to favor the method described by Mary Anne to the one you espouse. Why denigrate a perfectly good topic by moving it to Flame, and letting the flamers take over, simply because one or more manipulative posters let fly without constraint? In the case of one or more posters who attack threads with their personal agendas, or those who attack other posters because of personal or partisan motivations, why allow their vehemence to remove the thread from discussion by those who see merit in the topic?

From your (that includes you and Mary Anne) description of the power of the current program, it is possible to remove individual posts from threads without deleting them. If that's the case, I could easily see twin threads, on different forums--one would be used for the discussion, negative or positive, of the issue at hand; the other would be full of the flaming posts of a few dismissive, abusive elitists.

The possibility of the editing capacity sounds real good to me. I've made many posts, on numerous boards, only to have a realization immediately after clicking on Post. I've also seen horrible typos in posts by people who I knew were probably embarassed to see how their well-thought and emotionally-presented ideas might be perceived by the rest of us. Considering the number of serious scientists who attend this forum, and the need they have to maintain their professional credibility in all spheres of communication, the simple ability to post here and edit for grammar or spelling would be a boon.

At the same time, we've all seen those who posted vicious attacks and flames of an almost psychotic nature, or who exhibited the drunken side of their personality, who were allowed by software to simply later delete their misbehavior. Archiving does away with that security that's granted by less sophisticated editing programming.

An archiving program that would allow people to clean up their posts, and would permit moderators to do away with the occasional blastings without destroying the original statements made, would be great. Sometimes we need to be forced to confront our words, whether issued recently or earler in life. Sometimes we need to be able to hold obfuscators to the truth of their real statements. And sometimes we just need to be able to recall an instance where we were able to make an especially concise statement about some thing we believe, or an etherial "aha" moment.

The ability to make permanent utterances, which cannot, or might not be destroyed, is one of the beauties of the electronic age.