Apologies for the confusion, I was trying to tidy the badge group buy thread, whilst still trying to leave it making some sort of sense.
No offense to anyone who had any posts deleted, they may not necesarily have been the cause of the problem, but were caught up in the crossfire so to speak.
Although most off topic posts are left, this particular thread turned into a complete and utter mess - a thread in which a few people were trying to organise a group buy. In fact it got that messy, that funkystyling had to start a whole new one.
As a rule we do not delete posts, and if we do, we contact those involved. This thread however turned into a complete joke in my opinion. It most certainly annoyed the people trying to get things organised, caused a major headache for those who have to try and keep things in some sort of order, and became just the sort of topic/thread that would put off new members and alienate existing ones.
The people who constantly taketopics waaayy off topic are simply contributing to this alienation of members.
We have off topic areas, and a chat facility. These can be used for whatever particular off topic discussion people wish to have of an evening.
The odd bit of banter in a thread is acceptable of course, indeed it adds to the fun of the forum, but continuing to post off topic again and again after subtle hints from moderators to stop it, and the continued dragging off topic of thread after thread resulting in people having to start a whole new one is not acceptable.
Once again I appologise if this looks heavy handed, but I hope I speak for all the other guys here, when I say I hope that we can see an end to this.
Also - just to note, from time to time you will see the total posts figure droping for other reasons.
The administrator section (where tests are carried out before releasing to the board etc) and the public "testing" section are emptied every so often.