I am so ashamed that someone from my country could do such heinous act. After all Sapta was very trusted and amazing person in our Indonesian community.
If this keeps happening, who can we trust? Admin's job should be to enforce the rules, not to be a judge. The truth of the accusation against a casino should be determined based on the community, DT member and evidence.
Scam Accusation threads should never be silently removed. If for some reason action has to be taken then a public placeholder should be left and the reason should be mentioned. Then everyone will know what happened.
My takeaways:
- I'm disappointed that it took 3 months before this was noticed. Since these topics were typically deleted months after they were created, long after they died down, nobody noticed/complained until recently. Once somebody did post about one of the missing topics in Meta, I discovered the abuse within hours. Possibly, the ability of this to go undetected was exacerbated by the fact that the topics were deleted by means of moving them to the non-public "Trashcan" section, which isn't an action listed in the public modlog. I will probably change the modlog page to register such moves as deletions in the near future. (Though I'm not sure that anyone monitors the modlog page closely enough for such things to be noticed even then.)
- It's incredibly disappointing to see a moderator go rogue, but it's not unexpected for this to happen every once in a long while. That's why moderator actions are set up to be as easy to undo as possible, and why access is on a least-privilege basis.
I would tell theymos that even though a moderator has limited power, if his work goes unmonitored for months then that is a weakness. What do you think about requiring approval from a second moderator before a thread in Scam Accusations or Reputation board can be deleted or moved to the Trashcan? IMO the four eyes principle can be useful in reducing internal fraud.