Dandello wrote on Jun 7
th, 2013 at 11:10pm:
... they could scream about how these other people were misquoting them or out to get them or the quote was taken out of context... (you know the drill

).
I've never seen this as a reason to abrogate the ability of the majority of members who might want to modify or delete their own posts.
Problem members can always be banned for good reason if it comes to that, although peer pressure will often correct such bad behavior.
For those who choose to do it out of a need to keep a record of what's actually gone on, perhaps as part of the peer pressure process, members can always use the quote feature.
Bottom line: User friendly freedom of speech is pretty much always the best way to operate a forum.
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xnoddyx wrote on Jun 7
th, 2013 at 11:32pm:
... on a side note regarding user posts and copyright more so in the UK ...
Aside from any legal reasons to allow people to control their own speech, it's the morally correct thing to do.
Our forum hasn't had too many problems with bad behavior even though it does happen from time to time. Again, generally speaking, peer pressure corrects, or at least mitigates the bad behavior.
I suppose at some point if I ever feel compelled to be more dictatorial in the way I moderate our forum, I might choose to simply move questionable posts into a public board that is clearly marked as such. That way, people can choose to participate by reading or adding posts themselves, or they can simply use the rest of the forum in an otherwise user friendly fashion to honor the forum's intended purpose.
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In practice: Each one of us admin can pretty much operate our respective forums any way we wish. We have that freedom just as members have the freedom to leave if they feel any given admin is too oppressive to tolerate. Any member can also leave if an admin operates their forum in a free-for-all manner (
such as allowing spammers to invade, or allowing hate speech, etc.).
Each of our forums will be as popular or as unpopular as we are in the way that we administer them. That's just common sense.