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OK, here's what happened.
One of the mods contacted me and let me know that the user permissions were set so that a topic starter could delete and lock their own topics, which IS NOT A GOOD THING. I actually wasn't aware the settings were as such, and was glad that the mod let me know about it.
WHY IS IT NOT A GOOD THING? Imagine that a great topic is going, and there are hundreds of really good and thoughtful posts in it, and then the original topic-starter (either intentionally or accidentally) DELETES that topic? All of those great replies are gone forever.
I understand that occassionally, a user might want to remove a topic they started, but the safe way to do this is to limit this power to the mods, and have the user request the topic be removed by a mod. This keeps the risk of accidental or intentional topic removals to a minimum. As previously mentioned, if two users aren't getting along on the forum, the REMOVE and LOCK TOPIC functions can be abused. In truth, nobody should have had this ability to begin with. It only existed up until now because I didn't realize the default setting in this area gave this power to regular users.
I didn't make this change in reaction to any user's behavior on the forum. This is a correction to the forum settings that should have been in place from the beginning. I hope everyone understands and can see the reasoning behind this. Our main concern is to protect the replies and conversations occuring throughout the forum, and to reduce the chance of large sections of data being deleted by users.
Keep in mind, the user who starts a topic is not always the user who contributes the most to that topic or keeps the topic going, so it doesn't seem fair from our perspective to allow all the contributions of those that reply to a topic to be held at the mercy of the topic starter.
I'm temporarily unlocking this topic so users can respond to this explanation.
