Tombstoning vs complete deletion

Alfie_E

Thread number 604917 was in the Ebay, Auctions, Car Boot & Jumble Sales forum. It was called eBay Seller xxxxxxx (xx xxxxxxx xxxx) on ebay, xxx agent on ebay... xxxxxx xxxxxxxx, where the x’s denote blanked out material.

This thread has now been removed. I’m left wondering why this has happened. Did the OP regret starting the thread, and ask for it to be removed? Did the abuse team voluntarily remove it because it was getting out-of-hand, the business referred to asked for it to be removed or the abuse team themselves decided it was too contentious? Or, did the business referred to threaten MSE with legal action?

Because of the aggressive nature of comments that appeared to come from that business, I’m left considering it could have been the last of those three possibilities. That makes me consider the business in an even worse light.

Rather than completely removing threads, could they be replaced with locked threads containing a single post giving a short general reason for their removal – a “tombstone”? I appreciate that legal threats can prohibit even revealing that legal threats exist. In that case, maybe a general and vague “legal considerations” would be ok. Obviously, this wouldn’t be applied to the numerous spam threads that get started.