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

And, of course, one of its curses, but we'll learn to live with it and be better for it.

The word "censorship" is a sort of permanent but usually dormant hot button with me; I try to remain vigilant against it. I don't think there should ever be such a thing as "benign censorship" because that's a slippery slope. To the extent that moderation is synonymous with moderation, moderators should always be reluctant to act and regretful when they have to act. I don't want to be comfortable with the word "censorship".

But I disagree that moderation is necessarily synonymous with censorship. Moderators seem to rely most on censorial tools like deletion on high-traffic boards or boards with a transient population. In those environments, the messages are all you have to work with to maintain order.

The HabitableZone's been around long enough, with a stable population, to have developed a cohesive community, and that gives moderators an extra social dimension in which to act. Moderators have all come from the community, and they have a special peer-to-peer authority: Instead of deleting the message of a fellow community member, they can say "dude, your words suck, knock it off! I'm ashamed to know you!". Yeah, I acknowledge that inducing self-censorship through peer pressure still results in censorhip, but it results in consensual censorship in an exchange witnessed by the community.

It's important to understand that good moderation doesn't depend on the use of technical tools (and over-reliance on technical tools leads to bad moderation, because technical tools tend to be censorial in nature--they act on the words, not the people). Encouraging the Zone moderators to think in social terms has had the happy result that they've been able to express some personality and individualize their boards. ModBob is somewhat of an intellectual authoritarian on the Space/Science board with it serious subject matter and relatively high degree of formalism. Here on OffTopic, in contrast, Mary Anne gets to be the gracious hostess and occasionally the firm but gentle disciplinarian. Frank and Fox, two long-time serious debaters on opposite sides of the partisan arena, get to try to herd the partisan cats on Current Events. Me, I get to hang with the Zoners on Community, and talk shop on GeekSpeak; and flit around all the boards schmoozing. We all get to be ourselves to some degree.

You're correct about how people can "game the system" by flaming a thread to force otherwise valuable content to go stand in the corner at Flame. Here's a case where inadequate technical tools force moderators to rely on deletion or moving an entire thread--it isn't currently possible to pluck a message out of a thread and use it as the starting point of a new thread. Got left out of the toolbox because of some technical challenges. The "twinning" (or "bifurcation of threads") that you describe would be ideal, and an order of magnitude more complicated (since it involves composing a new thread from messages scattered all over the old thread while preserving a semblance of conversational order; and you have to fill the gaps left in the old thread). But it's a damn fine concept. I'll try to do it that way in the next revision.

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.

I hadn't looked at it that way, but you're exactly right. Another constituency like that is writers (of all flavors; those who enjoy the writing for its own sake), who like to polish and tinker with a work and maintain professional standards. When I work on a long post, I go through multiple drafts in some spots, and trim or expand material...and still I think of something later that I wished I'd thought of when I was writing.

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.

I think it's a good balance. The flip side is that in real life we all occasionally commit social faux pas that we regret later, and indeed our friends would be more than willing to forget and forgive. Real societies practice selective amnesia in the interests of keeping the peace. So this editing facility would sort of emulate that useful amnesia by allowing a person to replace the original drunken rant with an apology or mea culpa, while leaving the offense available "on the record"--penance with accountability. Things can be swept under the rug without letting people wriggle completely off the hook.