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Are you referring to the joke post you made in the Contest thread in the Announcements section which was not approved?

Posts in the Announcements sections are auto-moderated and are not shown to the public until manually approved. Yours was simply not approved as it was a joke about WoV and not relevant to the Announcement. So this is not a case of your message being made public and then removed without reason as you stated. It was never shown to the public to begin with and was simply never approved and therefore never made public.

Originally, we weren't going to allow replies to Announcements as announcements are just a one-way communication tool for us to inform the community about something new with the site. The Feedback section is the section intended for two-way discussions about site matters. However, our Members wanted to be able to reply to Announcements, so we allowed replies but with auto-moderation in that section to ensure only posts that are serious, on-topic, and relevant to the Announcement are shown.

The Announcement section is the only section of the site where posts need to be approved before going public to ensure the announcements themselves don't go off-topic or get drowned out by irrelevant posts as we don't want our important announcements to get lost.

No other section on the site has auto-moderation.

Furthermore, we spend so much time eliminating spam, that we unfortunately are unable to communicate the reason for every post that gets removed for spam or that doesn't get approved. But if you do have any questions about your posts, you are always free to post about it in the Feedback section like you did here (or send us a private message if you've enabled that feature), and we'll definitely address it like we're doing now.

Lastly, notice how there is very little Spam on our site. The vast majority of it gets caught by our Spam Filter before going public, so you folks never see it, which keeps the Forums clean and tidy for you. However, unlike our Members, we do see all the posts caught by the Spam Filter and every single one of them still needs to be dealt with manually by us, which is quite time-consuming. So there is a lot of work that goes behind-the-scenes which our Members don't see, and that's why we unfortunately can't address each unapproved post or spam that gets deleted.

Apologies for the confusion and hope this clarifies.

All that being said, in the future, would you folks prefer that Off-Topic posts in the Announcement section be moved to the Off-Topic section instead of simply not being approved?

If our Members prefer that solution, then we are happy to implement it.