deletion of wall coating threads

imaginarynumber

Could someone explain why so many of the threads relating to "specialist" wall coating are being deleted?

Most of the industry strikes me as being corrupt and the public are being charged thousands of pounds for poor service and workmanship.

Some of those customers have posted here, mentioning the firms that they dealt with by name.

Often the replies from the firms are abusive but they serve to illustrate to the public the types of people they are dealing with.

That is until the threads are summarily deleted, with no warning or explanation.

I have a lot of respect for this forum but I am starting to become disillusioned. Are we not allowed to name and shame firms any more?

Regards

Former_MSE_Andrea

Hi

Have you had a look at the Forum Rules to see if any of them applied in this instance? It's most likely your answer will be in there.

Andrea

imaginarynumber

MSE_Andrea wrote: »

Hi

Have you had a look at the Forum Rules to see if any of them applied in this instance? It's most likely your answer will be in there.

Andrea

Hi Andrea

Thanks for the reply.

I did glance at the rules and I can see that they are (understandably) there to protect MSE. I guess that 99% of posts could be deemed to be in breach of at least one of them (depending on who is interpreting the rules).

The problems seem to have started when a 10 page thread about a particular firm was deleted a couple of weeks ago.

Perhaps one could argue that it had turned into a witch hunt after the firm in question started to list the names and addresses of their unhappy customers. This was swiftly dealt with by the mods. Many of the other posts were related to the devious company structure and included links to companies house. They also highlighted the lies/untruths on their site and warned the site owner about legal statutory obligations


Sure the Rules do say "please don't give "advice". We don't have the resources to check what you say is correct" but that could be used as a cop out.

Since the deletion of that thread others have been disappearing- perhaps as many as 10 other threads some of which were 2 years old ( I am guessing here).

It does seem extremely odd that all threads mentioning different wall coating firms still exist- there are now no dissenting voices about the firm in question on this forum.

In one of the threads a poster made a comment that was later moderated pending review. I posted that I could see nothing wrong with his post, both of our posts were deleted and the whole thread (2 year old thread) a few days later - is questioning mod reviews against the Rules?

As members perhaps we should be given a list of firms that we are not allowed to discuss- sorry about the sarcastic tone of that comment but I devoted a lot of time into looking closely at the firm- I linked to all of my sources (often UK Gov sites) and feel very let down by MSE.

There is now only one consumer forum on the whole web that has any negative feed back about this firm.

Doesn't that strike you as odd. Even good firms have negative feedback from time to time.

Thanks for allowing me to let off a little steam

imaginarynumber

Hi Andrea as I still none the wiser i will post a link to a google cache for one of the threads

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nJxuXRwjq4UJ:forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php%3Fp%3D41675200+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&source=encrypted.google.com

I have posted it as a seperate post just incase posting links to old threads is not allowed.

Pease delete the post and not the tread if I am doing something wrong, and accept my apologies

Could you please explain what is wrong with any of the posts in the above thread?

thanks

Former_MSE_Forum_Manager

Hi imaginarynumber

Just seen this thread and wanted to help clarify. We have spent a good deal of time this week dealing with this behind the scenes and have had cause to remove the initial posts, and thus, your posts too. Apologies that your posts have vanished, it's an unavoidable result of the necessity of removing the thread.

It's important to clarify that there has been a lot of work and communication put in internally that isn't necessarily reflected in what you can (could) see in the thread. We don't go into detail, but hopefully letting you know the overview helps.

imaginarynumber

Thanks MSE forum manager.

Perhaps I was being a tad unfair to MSE but unfortunately I am still uncertain as to what is considered to be acceptable. I did receive a pm an hour ago on the CAG forum from a person whose name I shall not mention- he says that the threads are being deleted because a particular poster has made threats against him.

Frankly I do not know if the threats are real, nor do I know if they have been reciprocated.

I do know that the OP in a very long thread was concerned for her own safety because of a party that claims to be an innocent victim of a smear campaign. I too received aggressive PMs from him.

Threats aside, the crux of the long thread was that a given party denied any liability and was abusive to a woman who says that she believed that she was a customer of his. One of my concerns is that he will carry on acting as a broker but only mentioning the fact on one of the 400 or so of his site pages (namely the privacy page???).

I have no doubt that it was not your intention but you have given him a sense of validation- he now believes that the threads have been deleted because the criticisms are false..

If any of your fellow mods have been to his site I am sure that you will find it difficult to guess that he is just a broker. The whole site IMO is intentionally misleading- i and others asked him to make changes but as far as he is concerned there is no need to now- hence the only change being an extra page that brags about how he and his "contractors" have received an award for customer service!!! This is the bloke that says he doesn't have customers.

Am I to now to assume that it is against the Rules to mention his company name in other threads or that any future threads might be deleted if the supposed violent former "customer" adds a post?

I do appreciate that your hands are tied with regard to responding to me- and that you are privy to information that I am not. never-the-less though I am not sure that the thread deletion is in the interests of the public, sorry, but many of the posts were an amalgamation of information that is in the public domain.

Regards.