During the last day two rants with controversary debates dissapeared here. Is there a moderator deleting such rants?

Interesting, what was the subject matter? Maybe we could do a test debate along the same lines to see if it disappears, i'll happily oppose any viewpoint for the sake of the experiment.

One was just some hours ago, about devrant itself (boring reposts and the need for downvoting). The other rant was last sunday and about the use of the "goto" command. In the sundays discussions there was at least one offensive posting that got a downvoting.

If you post "I use goto" you will see what can happen here....

@DivByZero
maybe someone reported your rant I suppose

++ this cuz the matter needs to be resolved / explained. We cannot be unsure about such things, it's bad for community.

@AboMahdi It weren't my rants, i just watched the one and wrote a comment in the other one. I am quite sure that the post of one person was reported, but that doesnt explain that the whole discussion dissapeared.

@all Just want to correct a mistyping in my rant. I meant "During the last days..."

@DivByZero well, if you're using C, goto statements are the only sane way to handle allocation and deallocation of multiple resources (at least without incurring an exponentially increasing number of branches).

@helloworld @Arlekin I found out what happens to missing rants... Are you still there?

@DivByZero
Go on then, don't build the suspense up

@Arlekin Sorry, suspense wasnt my intention :)
If a rant is downvoted by power ranters it will automatically be sorted out from the devrant recent feed.
There has been an interesting discussion about that here:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/417135

I wrote extension for firefox and chrome (both are in the webstores now) that scan the recent feed for missing links.
During the last 3 days these rants dissapeared:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/441626
https://www.devrant.io/rants/439764
https://www.devrant.io/rants/439902
https://www.devrant.io/rants/440091
https://www.devrant.io/rants/440722
https://www.devrant.io/rants/439145
https://www.devrant.io/rants/439041
https://www.devrant.io/rants/438879
https://www.devrant.io/rants/438678
https://www.devrant.io/rants/437732

@DivByZero So they are buried like bad reviews on google?

@helloworld Yes. Just sorted out. They are not deleted, but the result is the same. So the recent feed actually is an algo feet.

Lol. I wrote too fast. There are no feet in the feed...

I'd say it's kinda fair - say rant is abusive: you wouldn't want to have it on display, but it would be sketchy to remove them.

IMHO it's alright

@Arlekin So its fair if one person decides that it hidden to everyone?

@DivByZero From what you wrote i gathered it's automated based on downvotes

@Arlekin This rant got 101 upvotes and was removed from the feed also: https://www.devrant.io/rants/440429

@DivByZero then that's unsettling...

@dfox @trogus - care to comment? Really, whatever statement here would be good for all of us, just for the peace of mind

We don't guarantee any rants specific placement and leave it almost entirely up to user voting.

Rants are never deleted unless they contain something illegal/highly offensive/are spam (there's probably been less than 20 of those since devRant was released). But that certainly doesn't mean every rant will show up in top or be featured prominently and nearly all of that is decided by voting.

But we do some moderation, mainly in regards to reposts and content that is blatantly stolen.

While I greatly dislike rants that tell people what to post and consider it back-seat moderating which many communities explicitly disallow, we do keep them around. But that also means they are fair game when it comes to downvoting, even as spam/offensive, which can cause them to be removed from feeds.

And, just to be clear - yes, the recent feed is absolutely not every rant. It was originally just that, but by overwhelming user-demand, we had to change that and it is now curated by voting, reposts, etc.

One more thing to add - if you haven't been around here for a while, you might not be aware, we do have topics that we have publicly stated are not allowed to be discussed and though we do enforce that policy, we don't even delete those rants. The main topic there being politics (that aren't strictly dev-related). In terms of non-user voting moderation, by far the most removals by us come from there.

We took the temperature for that policy and it received overwhelming support because the general consensus was few people wanted political discussion here.

In the end, any policy we have comes specifically from user feedback. We've cracked down majority on reposts because of lots of user feedback, and many things fall into that area (repetitive feedback about devRant itself, dfox ++'d my rant posts, etc).