[Lara]

Originally Posted by DocJohn

a few members have been abusing this privilege to 'change history' in controversial threads, or threads where things have gone in a direction the member didn't care for. It was creating very difficult and time consuming moderation situations where a post was reported for an issue, but then changed or removed by the original poster to make it look like there was no issue. Or a moderator would go in and remove something inconsistent with our community guidelines, only to find the poster goes back and changes it back later on. And so on. The Community Team can't do their job here if the floor keeps moving under their feet.

loisba, I've deleted posts on forums because of certain circumstances, not to go out of my way to create chaos or trouble, but because I felt unsafe. Admin. know about that and they knew why.

There are circumstances which some people might never know anything about where a poster might need to delete their posts. That is different from a few members changing their posts so that the message ends up being a totally different one on controversial threads as DocJohn has described above. Not everyone edits or deletes their posts in a manner which creates chaos or to cause trouble, but I've certainly seen people on forums do that. Sometimes members have extremely serious, personal and valid reasons for editing or deleting a post which many other members might have absolutely no idea what those reasons are all about. I've also noticed that certain banned members on some forums have all their messages removed. That can change the flow of conversation too! (Understatement) lol

Heck, I've had an awful day. Perhaps I'm not understanding correctly what the original message is, but I read it as being about abuse of the system, not use of the system.