As I said earlier, I haven't seen that much groupthink here. That said, clarification of the role of front-pagers whether they intervene as a moderator or as a participant in the debate might help (although I think it is usually clear).
I am regularly amazed by the quality of the debates and by the respect and the openness showed by ET users in the exchanges. I think it is one of our great achievements. We will not avoid further heated debates and I think it's a healthy thing. However, as the community is growing, we have to be more careful about the various sensitivities and the way our words can be understood. "Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char
I fully agree with your view. About diary deletion, I think once commented, a diary is a collective thing, so deletion shouldn't be allowed after comments have been posted. However, if a diarist wishes to delete a diary, it should be possible (by administrators) after consultation of the posters.
The problem with restricting own-diary editing by default is that it would require admin intervention even for trivial reformatting and typo correction.
For that reason I advocate keeping things open by default until first offence or threat of offence and then people can be deprived of self-editing abilities. Which is basically what has happened over the past two weeks. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
AFAIU, at present that becomes a delete ... indeed, it may well be that that is what "delete" does (I certainly have not looked at the code to know what the delete button actually does in process terms) ... it would have to be re-programmed to become dummy text, because the system is not set up to cope with posts with zero content, even if they do have comments attached. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
