I’m also curious to know why some topics are unlisted/locked, then silently deleted.
Won’t list any here[1] but I do have a hard time understanding how they’re making a mess as a whole, given the amount of overall traffic on this forum.
Leaving some of those locked will just feel more transparent and look more open (to criticism/constructive improvement on both ends). 
feel free to ask me on my Signal if you want to know more ↩︎
Thanks for chipping in Jonah. What about kissu’s post? I also opened a topic which was immediately unlisted and then locked. To me this is a lack of transparency.
Also, if a suggestion was rejected for reasons that are no longer valid (see Librewolf topic for instance), would you recommend us opening a new topic or…?
I can’t find such a post in your history?
I’m not sure if this is against community guideline to post unlisted topic, but since you’re asking, I’m sure it will be fine:
Lmao, now the topic is deleted. What is going on?? @jonah
Good Monday all! 
I apparently need to do so on a Sunday evening.
So here we go:
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/latest?status=deleted, quick and dirty way to see the deleted threads (not messages inside but still)/deleted-posts is also a decent easy starting pointhttps://discuss.privacyguides.net/admin/logs/staff_action_logs?filters={"action_name":"delete_post","action_id":17,"acting_user":"YOUR_USERNAME"} SELECT p.id, p.user_id, u.username AS author, p.topic_id, p.raw, p.deleted_at, deleter.username AS deleted_by
FROM posts p
JOIN users u ON u.id = p.user_id
JOIN users deleter ON deleter.id = p.deleted_by_id
WHERE p.deleted_at IS NOT NULL
AND deleter.username = 'admin_username'
ORDER BY p.deleted_at DESC
You probably know the rest, I won’t be cocky explaining how to query a DB any further.
My point: it is quite trivial to find out what/where/when was deleted, let’s not pretend it’s not there or hard to find especially with admin access.
Alright, I’ll be taking the voice regarding some concerns people have raised publicly[1] and apply a pragmatic filter on some of their takes.
Idea is not to get into drama or waste everybody’s time but to get short and clear answer as of why some topics are again, silently deleted.
bring a negative or crusade mood against PG[2] endless drama/bikeshedding about some endless nonsense
get to have some transparency as of why controversial topics are shadow-removed on a forum that is about privacy and doing things in a respectful manner[3]I do understand the reasons of deleting topics when it comes down to:
resolved ✅ unilaterally[4]Deleting it tho? Sounds a bit heavy-handed and unnecessary. 
Let’s then talk about this specific thread
Is Constructive Feedback on Whonix/KickSecure Being
Censored?
Here is a PDF printed version of the webpage[5]
Is Constructive Feedback on Whonix_KickSecure Being Censored_ - Meta - Privacy Guides Community.pdf (253.2 KB)
If I were spreading misinformation, I would understand the removal. However, I’m sharing factual observations which I believe contribute to healthy discourse.
Which is what could be nice overall here if left in the open: healthy discourse.
Their first message is overall better written than anything I could up with my own english. 
The overall point of how good their current thread (or past thread) can be discussed, yet they were professional and respectful.
Nothing on PG’s side that would be too concerning or alarming, pass on this one.
Again, I cannot say if it’s a lie or correct but I wouldn’t see why a person would do such things and create chaos while coming with nice intentions at the same time.
Concerning point tho is the fact that @jonah reacted by proposing OP to just create a blog to avoid such issues in the future.
I do not disagree with people hosting their own blog/socials[6], yet it looks like a weird thing to say to somebody on a forum.
Don’t want your thing deleted bro? Just build your own
It reminded me of this take that @nateb had on a totally different thread that clearly said that not everybody has the time to just spin a blog on their free time in between chores/kids/work.
I myself stopped writing lengthy explanations into the Questions section of this forum where I usually pour a few hours in total for topics I do enjoy around privacy.
They are (usually) less subject to being unlisted but still, I would have them being deleted for X or Y reason[7]
It’s not the end of the day for someone technical or with enough time it’s doable, but quite uncool as a whole.
Let’s proceed.
@jonah closed this overall messy thread with strong opinions by marking with the following
OP inquired “Is Constructive Feedback on Whonix/KickSecure Being Censored?” and the answer was that no, this did not happen in this moderation case. I don’t see how further comments from non-moderators about our past moderation events can be constructive, so I am closing this as a resolved question.
Which is also fair and square. Nothing wrong with that kind of behavior. 
Now, after a few days the entire thread is unlisted, then deleted.
Why?! 
(cc @team)
There are no reasons to delete such a post
There are a few rules in the TOS that are a bit fancy:
You may no longer use the forum if the company contacts you directly to say that you may notYou may not automate access to the forum, or monitor the forum, such as with a web crawler, browser plug-in or add-on, or other computer program that is not a web browser. You may crawl the forum to index it for a publicly available search engine, if you run one.but overall nothing alarming or too weird that was broken in the thread above.
Maybe this case in isolation is not that bad of a situation you might say?
And I would very much agree but this is (unfortunately) a recurring theme at this point. 
More threads were also deleted, here are 2 samples:
I won’t be sharing any backups for those here but feel free to reach out on Signal if you want to know more.
Now, you might be wondering why are those posts deleted?
And I have no idea besides looking dirty, maybe?
Moreover, I don’t mind having posts deleted for a fair reason (as stated above) but it’s just not cool to have it delayed enough to fly under the radar of people noticing.
Reminds me of what some companies are doing when it comes down to hiding their mess under a rug when the storm is finally settling down… 
Some folks here do indeed care and could go over their 4 past months of browser history just to see if some of their Internet friends replied to their messages on the Internet[8], turns out quite a few others were also deleted.
Might be because scams/duplicate or others and that’s fair but let’s please keep this community healthy and have something transparent where we do not censor people’s voice unless no-one is noticing it on the front page of the forum. 
Most people that are upset about this situation want the community to thrive
I myself applied for the position of doing some videos for the PG team back in October 29, 2025 as shown below 
I indeed wanted to push the community forward and bring healthy interactions yet allow everybody to be heard. Let’s not split this community further, we need to stick together more than ever given what’s happening out there. 
Yet I cannot stand behind the latest PG’s moderation/behavior when it comes down to allow conversation to happen: controversial, news-related or just about security/privacy in general. 
Now, I personally can will build a small little community anyway, so my disagreement with PG’s way of handling things here is not really a huge deal breaker.
Yet, it would be nice to not leave everybody left in the streets given that we had some recent loss already. Some amazing people left already, let’s stop the bleeding and make everything in the best interest of everybody here.
We all want PG to be a cool place to hang around with our online friends.
PS: I spent quite some time and soul writing this in the best way possible.
Hopefully I won’t need to use a backup and this thread won’t be another of the lost ones… 
or privately on Signal ↩︎
most people that were/are still here stay because they like what PG is doing ↩︎
I’m a group of people that do dislike some of this behavior and I’m personally trying to add a bit of water to their wine but it is getting harder by the day when things pile up as of lately ↩︎
as in, mark it as solved yourself with admin rights, rather than letting OP do that themselves, which is borderline “I got you bro, let me just close it for you” ↩︎
but you could also copy-paste this URL into your favorite archiving tool if afraid of opening a random pdf file on the Internet: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/is-constructive-feedback-on-whonix-kicksecure-being-censored/35760/8 ↩︎
quite the opposite, I would encourage everybody to not be dependent on any platform, forum or whatever and keep their sovereignty as much as possible by using standards ↩︎
I guess that from now on, I’ll be just writing things on my own like @ThePrivacyDad and sharing them here for feedback, less interactive for sure… 
↩︎
don’t ask me how I know that one ↩︎
Then why use silly terms like shadow-removed as if we are some sort of secretive cabal? There is nothing shadowy about the fact that, frankly, this forum has been a much less chill and respectful place recently, which is absolutely regrettable, but it’s outside of my power to change that. In my ideal, at least, people should be free to say basically whatever they want, so long as it’s relevant and civil, but that requires all parties to engage in good faith, which I think we can probably agree is not currently the case.
It also seems to me that a lot of complaints basically come down to thinking unlisted posts demonstrate a lack of transparency, but I don’t know how else we can be expected to remove posts which violate the rules.
In the spirit of transparency, we are currently engaged in a conversation regarding this internally, but it has not yet yielded anything for us to share.
This will be the definitive post on this topic because these posts are disruptive to the users who are solely here to discuss privacy and security-related topics. It’s also more constructive if we can have a general conversation here rather than individuals posting wanting more information about specific posts of theirs; those questions should still be directed to @moderators.
I don’t see any other name for what I feel when I do type the name of the thread I’m looking for into my browser and are greeted with a 404 in the next day.
A head’s up or just seeing the thing locked is enough, moreover it will mostly just drown amongst all the posts on the main homepage.
My current setup shows 13 threads on the main page
Give it 6 hours and it won’t be bothering anybody else if it’s not bumped up here.
Read-only is not bothering anybody given the “visual noise” argument. 
Not sure how or why but I am sorry about that one too.
I guess that some nice positive people leaving plays a role into that.
Exactly. Let people write their thoughts and not remove any of them is the crux of my message.
Not all threads are bloody and full of anger, some of them come from frustration or incomprehension.
We cannot know which rules are violated if nobody knows why a thread is removed.
Moreover, I’m not sure to understand what rules got violated in some of the above dead links.
Thanks for sharing this one. We’ll wait for some updates (hopefully on this exact thread). 
This one is (as stated in my first message) very relative.
The actual overwhelming homepage of this Discourse is real when opening it but most of the time, filtering by specific categories like News, Questions etc…helps.
Since this exact thread is inside of Meta as of right now, I don’t see it being anymore disruptive than any other meta thread.
Moreover, we could indeed just focus on the main Security + Privacy topic (99% of my messages here) yet sometimes, it’s also important to change a few things around and provide some feedback both ways.
For example, the recent removal of the Twitter share button was a quick and dirty necessary non-disruptive one.
Let’s consider this Forum moderation as equally necessary given people’s consensus.
Especially when looking at the reactions themselves from the people most active on this forum
A lurker interested about some tips about a good VPS provider[1] won’t care or stick around for long enough anyway, so not a huge deal breaker. 
Exactly the point of my message too and why quite a bunch of people are upset as of today.
Those threads of common grounds for discussion were deleted.
Hence I’m once asking again by bringing it up with some facts/links to illustrate all of it.
Splitting things individually is indeed not very constructive.
Yet, not discussing about constructive criticism in favor of the latest news is also avoiding a slowly raising problem/community concern.
I’m not sure what is the different between @mods or @team, hence preferred to cc large.
Sorry if @mods was more than enough, duly noted.
PS: I’m moreover merely just a messenger here that is trying to forward people’s concerns that are (or were on this forum). I might not know all of the deleted threads or unanswered moderations conversations handled privately.
Maybe there are no more like those, maybe there are far more, that I cannot say.
Yet I’ve seen some after just a few months on this forum and it is (apparently) also why some people left some time ago (because we had several waves of people leaving this forum[2]).
Again, coming cool-headed and with good intentions with that lengthy message of mine.
Some people behind me are not as chill but I’m filtering some of their words haha.
Moreover, since we’re trying to do things in the open here I’ll take the liberty to potentially summon a few of the people that could be interested into this topic (given that I am not sure how the split into another thread impacted their notifications).
cc @Anvil @null @destiny @Expert4870 @win11.shading291 @micdan @LoSee21 @gapless @lyricism
If not interested/bothered, sorry ahead of time folks. 
It’s also more constructive if we can have a general conversation here rather than individuals posting wanting more information about specific posts of theirs; those questions should still be directed to @moderators.
I want to mention that the moderation team ignores my private message to the mod team for a month and after that closed it. Without responding.
In this message I complained that a big message from me was deleted out of a discussion and without this message my whole point from and out stander seems silly, because he lacks of the context.
In addition, this post was shadow removed. And yes I call it shadow removed, because it was shadowy.
There was no “post deleted” instead of my actual message rather than it just vanished.
This is an example to demonstrate to you that, your proposal will not work.
The post in question had an expletive in it. The moderation told you to remove it.
You chose to replace it by asterisk-ing most of the letters out but it was still rather obvious what you meant at which point another member of the moderation removed the post AGAIN because this is a clear violation of the PG CoC.
Which led to you complaining and messaging the moderators several times about it.
Sometimes no answer is an answer, too.
So I’m not allowed to say someone is completely false?
There is no rule against it.
Edit:
For context:
This was no insult or attack of the person. I just stated the argument was completely false.
Which is allowed.
We are currently discussing this topic amongst ourselves, and to avoid a lot of needless back and forth in the meantime like the post above, I am going to ask everyone to take a breather in between posts here, and enable a slow mode on this thread until we finish our own discussion, which will still allow other community members to comment if they haven’t already. I trust nobody will open new threads or side-conversations to bypass this limit, thanks everyone.
I think there is a major issue with consistency in moderation here, clarity in what the rules actually are, and unwillingness by moderation to actually discuss there decisions in good faith which is also making this conversation more difficult.
For example, a major and I think good rule is:
When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. Replying encourages bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it .
However, once, there were a series of replies in a thread which in my opinion were derailing a thread, so I reported them for being off topic. I was open to a moderator disagreeing with me and leaving them up, but I wanted to raise it to staff’s attention. Instead, I was shocked to have a moderator globally silence my account for two weeks, saying I was engaging in a mass flagging campaign with another user, who I don’t know how I was expected to control their flagging activities or even what they were, but somehow both of us flagging these posts led to my silencing.
The best explanation I got was that I “Consumed disproportionate amounts of staff time”. However, I was even more confused when a decent number of the posts I had flagged were removed for being off topic. So, wouldn’t the person who consumed the disproportionate amount of staff time be the ones who had been posting off topic replies? Further, in the same breath I was told “You are NOT supposed to fight it out in the thread yourselves, notify the moderation and let us deal with it.”, which was exactly what I was doing that apparently got me muted. I mostly tried not replying to the off topic posts except to point out they were off topic (I expected those replies to get removed alongside the off topic posts if moderators took the action I expected).
When I tried to engage with moderation and explain that I flagged them in good faith but I understand if they disagree with the flags and I just didn’t understand why flagging a series of off topic posts would lead to me getting silenced since it is a rule on the forum to flag things you think might break the rules, I was told to leave if I didn’t like it.
I understand this is your forum and you can run it however you like, but it is also a community, and there doesn’t seem to be a good faith relationship between the community and moderation any longer. Moderators did not have any willingness to hear my side, they basically just told me to screw off when I legitimately came to them confused about what happened.
I have tried not raising this as a public issue because I generally feel doing such a thing is in poor taste, but I see that others might have similar thoughts and my experience might be a good example. I don’t think I was perfect in this situation, but I think the handling was shockingly poor and frankly inexplicable on the moderation side.
For future reference, this is precisely the problem. It doesn’t matter if you expected your replies to be removed, because it sounds like your replies also caused more off-topic posts since you had to send more than one.
Additionally, it is a waste of time to flag many off-topic posts in the same thread. If a flag brings a thread to our attention, then the moderators will read the whole thing in context, and can make decisions on all the offending posts without them all having been flagged. The only exception might be if the posts contain pure spam or illegal content, since flagging them might preemptively hide them, but if they don’t absolutely need to be immediately hidden from the community (off-topic comments don’t) then every single one doesn’t need to be flagged. I don’t think this was the biggest problem, replying was the biggest problem, but it doesn’t help.
I understand your points though, we can update our guidelines to be more clear on both of these points.
If you can send me a link to the DM you’re referring to I’d appreciate it, otherwise I will seek it out. Thanks for your feedback.
Edit: to be clear I am not yet familiar with the specific case you’re referring to, but I think I can tell what the problem was only from what you described.
Thanks for doing this, I do have some personal experience to share.
I was once a core moderator of a online community with approx. 10k members, at times there were heated debate, and of course there are plenty of misinformation, false claims, defamation, etc.
I don’t usually remove posts / threads as it doesn’t resolve conflicts, nor helping with busting myths. What I do was
I remove contents if and only if
I do find the above measures are quite effective in both moderation and community education perspective.
Just my 2 cents. Sorry it gets longer than I was expected.
How did you do this system, was this built in to your forum software or did you use some other tool?
Thanks for your feedback.
I do appreciate:
Thanks.
This is the thing I find most frustrating: some threads get unlisted (which is fine in most cases) but then are completely deleted after a few days, as if they’re being memory-holed. What is the reason for not leaving an unlisted (and, in most cases, locked) thread alone instead of just completely nuking it?
I think everything you said basically makes sense, but I should clarify (if only for the purpose of making sure the feedback I provided is as useful to you as possible) that I was told that the reason for the silencing was the flags, not any replies. If that is not correct, then at minimum the explanation for my silencing I think should have been clearer. I also just reviewed the messages between myself and the moderators again while collecting links I’ll be sending to you in DMs and while I can’t see all my posts from the thread anymore I might have overstated in my first post here any amounts of replying I did to the off topic messages, because I specifically mention in those DMs that I was careful not to reply to those and just flag them, with no one correcting me on that point, so I now do think it’s more likely I didn’t reply to the posts I flagged.
That said, I am certainly much more sympathetic to concerns about individual members replying to off topic posts to in their view (but probably often not successfully) “help” stop a thread from being derailed, that just wasn’t what I was told the issue was, doesn’t seem to have been what happened going off my memory and the conversation in DMs with the mods about it, and even if I had I also don’t think a first offense there on my part (as far as I know) warranted much more than a warning TBH. A global silencing for almost two weeks was just not proportional if that was my mistake.
I appreciate you taking the time to hear me and everyone else out. I can’t speak for everyone but for me personally even just that helps restore a decent amount of confidence in the moderation here.
Edit: I tried to DM you as you asked but I am not able to apparently.
Just popping in to say that I have also found thread deletion to feel heavy handed at times, and have seen users quickly recreate essentially the same thread within a few days either because they could not find their original thread, or because they had the same/similar question as the OP of a deleted thread.
I can understand deleting entire threads where discussion of illegal activity or violations of user right to be forgotten is occurring, however using deleting whole threads (not just singular posts) in places where the violations are more minor can lead to confusion amongst users, and uncertainty regarding moderator action.
I hope this thread can act as a civil place to discuss these matter of moderation, so that confusion and perceived grudges can be reduced going forward. Privacy Guides, and privacy advocacy more generally is a niche community, and we need to stick together if we have any hope of making progress on the matters that are truly important to us as a community.
