Please ease up off the delete thread button

I have no idea where I can post this where it won't get deleted, or be allowed to be discussed. So if this is not the correct place to put this, please I ask you to simply move it there and not delete this thread for being in the wrong forum.

I've been on these forums and the past forums for most of my time playing WoW. Until the new forums, the forums were more or less pretty decent place. Had your usual amounts of trolling and what not, still there now even.

But nowadays, depending what time of day it is, what forum you're in.....communication has become extremely irritating. I go to check out the top of "blue posts" on the front page of the community portal each day, and most days they return a 404 not found error because they've already been deleted.

I encounter the same problem with "popular topics" some days as much as 50% of the "popular topics" are simply deleted.

Don't even get me STARTED on realm forums. Unless you post like a soccer mom in her 40's on realm forums your posts get deleted. You can't disagree with someone, dislike someone, have anything bad to say or you get deleted. Thread after thread after thread gets deleted for my own realm forums. It makes the realm forums 100% worthless and I'm relatively sure this issue with the realm forums has existed for a long time. Threads simply get a lot of 'anti-poster" reports, and they vanish.

No, this is not a problem with you guys needing to give your code work a once over to ensure deleted items no longer appear linked at such places. It is a symptom of you and yours being far too liberal with the delete button.

When a topic gets out of hand, why is it so difficult to simply delete the few problem posts, and then lock the thread? Problem solved, no? At the very least, could we add a little responsibility and accountability to the deletes, and instead of returning 404 not found have it throw up a "This thread has been deleted for <insert lawyer code of conduct that was broken>. Sorry for the inconvenience" and then throw in a link to the code of conduct and call it a day.

When a large thread with a lot of dicussion gets completely deleted I feel like some black FBI car has shown up and thrown all the posts inside and flashed a red memory eraser at the forums for good measure before peeling out. It doesn't make me feel good about wanting to keep posting on the forums.