Unfortunately as a moderator i sometimes have to do/say unpopular things, altrhough these are generally unpopular with a minority only. On the whole i act as an individual member and only speak up/take action when I feel the need but try and leave the bigger stuff to Dave, and hence this topic is still here !
Indeed it is still here.
And for those curious, here is my thinking along the lines of why I left it in place and the way I deal with forum issues:
First of all, although it did have a very "spammy" feel to it, it didn't have the feel of your usual spam.
It had numbers about on-topic stuff that might be of interest to some people, and whilst I didn't entirely agree with them or what was said, it is not my place to kill it because of that. I'm trying my best to run a "A Free & Open Forum For Electronics Enthusiasts & Professionals" as it says up the top. And that philosophy extends to commercial companies, provided they play nice and genuinely contribute something useful (good ads can in fact be useful IMO), just like I used to get great value out of reading the ads in the electronics magazines decades ago.
But it did warrant banning them, so I did just that, knowing that if they were genuine and wanted a right of reply or to get back in to clear the air, they could email me and explain.
As it turns out, I was right, and this post, whilst commercial, wasn't meant to come out like it did, as pointed out in a personal email from the poster I got. After I got that email, that was good enough for me to un-ban them.
Second, I thought the topic and post might have prompted lots of good on-topic discussion on the topic, so I'm not actually above leaving even deliberate spam messages in place, if good discussion (or even general social banter) has resulted from it.
I often see moderation reports calling for an entire thread to be killed because it started as a spam or whatever. Well, if you kill the thread then you kill all the messages of those genuine people who spent their time replying, and to me that's just not a kosher thing to do. I don't like erasing anyone's contribution unless I absolutely have to, even if it's just social banter.
Once you start moderating to try and keep things reasonably "on-topic", then the slippery slope it never ends, and you end up with the Altium forum!
And of course, strict moderation has rarely proven to work on any technical forum, so it's foolish to even try.
A similar reasoning holds for flame wars and other silly little personal fights in threads. I just laugh knowing that it's a storm in tea cup and it will all pass, and it almost always does.
This is a social forum as well as a technical forum, that's just human nature, so my philology is to let almost everything slide, and only delete those things where it is truly necessary. I think those things would be pretty self evident to all reasonably civilised people.
The other moderators might not necessarily agree with my views (that's human nature too), and that's fine as well, but I trust them to do what they think is right in individual circumstances. And I think they are doing a great "hands off" job as well, so thanks guys!
Dave.