A few days back, a forum member posted a cartoon with objectionable content and the thread that contained the cartoon was removed from the forum. Today, that same member referenced the deleted thread in another post. That action was confusing to those that had not read the previously deleted thread, first of all. Second, it was causing certain groups, organizations and individuals to be identified in subsequent replies.

One of the reasons this forum is this busy is that Highlandtide has busted his chops to optimize this site with the various search engines. He has been successful, as this site is being crawled on a regular basis, to collect keywords for search engine results.

We have some very specific rules and guidelines about topics that are not going to be welcome on this forum. One of the reasons these topics are forbidden is that we do not want these negative keywords to be available to the search engine spiders.

I know there are times when people cannot understand why a post or thread has been removed, but if everyone will try to imagine that the forum staff just might have very good reason for our actions, we'll eliminate some of the hard feelings.

If a thread is removed or locked, it is not going to bring favor to anyone that tries to obliquely re-visit or reference the issue at a later date.

We've had this situation crop up on two different occasions, in the last 24 hours and we don't want further instances.

I think we would all do well to take a few moments and glance through 'The Rules, just to re-familiarize ourselves with the yeas and nays. I'm aware that people often chafe when presented with a list of rules, but this forum community did not grow to this point by ignoring the rules.