If a hypothetical user anonymously posts something that is slightly too sexual or inappropriate, do admins/moderators know who it is when they delete it? Or do they only find out when they're blatantly breaking the rules?
Moderators and Admisnistrators CAN see who posted it anonymously. So yeah, if someone breaks the rules or posts anything inappropriate, you will find a Personal Message from one of them.
I know someone at my GSA who also goes on EC. He told me that one of his posts on the anonymous section just banished. He said it was a sex related post. He never got any personal message from a moderator.
Yes, mods or admins may also delete your post. It's up to them I guess. I once posted something anonymously, it violated some rules so my post was deleted. But I did get a message from Spartan.
The staff team don't see who the poster is behind an Anonymous post. The Anonymous display there is the same as what everybody else sees. Instead, we just have different tools that we can use to locate who a poster is, with the most accurate being the Anonymous Logs. Access to this is strictly reserved to the Administration Team usergroups, though. Mods and Advisors have alternative ways to identify users, in case of an emergency, but it's not as easy and conclusive, so they'll typically leave it to the Administration Team to oversee to ensure accurate identification. Each infraction within the section is dealt with on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether there are sufficient grounds to justify overriding a user's anonymity by contacting them. Although the ideal would be to contact each and every person, sometimes the removal of the content either speaks for itself, or the content might not be appropriate for the site but still contains something that would cause embarrassment or undue stress if that user was contacted. It is why, for example, we deal with inappropriately placed Anon threads by locking and leaving a public warning, rather than removing it and informing the OP privately. Unfortunately, there are cases when leaving it up just isn't really feasible, so it has to be removed and the staff team has to decide whether the issue overrides that members right to privacy. As stated earlier, in numerous cases the content removal speaks for itself, so it often isn't always worth causing further embarrassment by stripping them of their anonymity by directly contacting them, especially if it's an innocent mistake rather than an abuse of service. Finally, if the OP can't figure out why their content was removed, they always have the option of using Ask The Staff to receive information about this, which gives them control over whether they wish to de-Anon themselves to staff. I'm not sure which thread or post we're referring to here, but it sounds like your friend has already figured out the reason for that removal without staff identifying and contacting them. If that is the case, that would demonstrate the balance that we aim for between moderation clarity and user privacy. If, however, there are aspects to this decision he does not understand or wants further information on, the power is in his hands to reach out to staff and get that. It sounds like, for whatever reason, his right to privacy outweighed the need of staff to de-anonymise him privately. It sounds like it would be the right decision, if he has been able to deduce the cause of removal without having that private contact. That last part is mostly speculative, as I can only really hypothesise the most likely thinking process without knowing the exact situation that transpired.
A suggestion... When faced with a post that needs to go bye bye, you might consider removing the body of text in the post and replacing it with some message that says in essence: "This is edited because it's against EC policy. If you have any questions, post in Ask the Staff section". That way, when the poster comes back, and looks for the thread, it will be absolutely clear that it was against forum policy, and didn't vanish because a computer crashed.
