PCGS forum deletes member accounts

Not until recently over the last year. It would take days for things to come down that you knew were going to be poofed for sure earlier in the year, not to mention countless things that would have gotten one banned from here.

I would bet that the major reason Heather was assigned to take over the boards is that the higher ups were sick of all the email and complaints they were getting about the forum. Will there be a feeling out period to the new moderation of course, but part of why it seems so heavy handed is because of how lightly moderated it was for quite a while. I certainly enjoyed reading the anything goes style better, but it's better for their company to clean up the board some and get rid of posters that spend a lot of their time talking down the company and/or grading in general.

There's a right to vote, a right to an attorney when arrested but there is no actual right to have your complains remain public on a companies website.

That said there is a right way and a wrong way to express concerns. Publicly blasting a company on their own web site which is what many of the banned were doing is not the right way. Just how you approach the situation matters. I was surprised how long people were allowed to make accusations against them, publicly talk them down like they know nothing ect.

Most of the bans were bans that would have happened on other company sites as well and most other companies would have done them a lot sooner.

 

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A few months ago I did notice a BIG change in the way PCGS’s Instagram account was managed. It initially was sort of robotic and disconnected from the people in the IG coin community. Now, whoever is running it, is much more engaged and personal with everyone on the platform.

 

I have no intentions of joining the CU forum. Too many stuck-up egomaniacs, and I am probably already banned because I am not afraid to show UNDENIABLE PROOF that PCGS is not perfect and consistent.

I’d like any to look me in the eye and tell me this is correctly graded. It would be a humorous conversation.

 

Not even close... like so many you confuse rights with privileges and options.

A right is "n. an entitlement to something, whether to concepts like justice and due process or to ownership of property or some interest in property, real or personal. These rights include: various freedoms; protection against interference with enjoyment of life and property; civil rights enjoyed by citizens such as voting and access to the courts; natural rights accepted by civilized societies; human rights to protect people throughout the world from terror, torture, barbaric practices and deprivation of civil rights and profit from their labor; and such U.S. constitutional guarantees as the right to freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly and petition." (https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1857)

You are not entitled to post on somebody's private site, even if it is made available to the public (read the terms and conditions you agreed with when you created your account).

Posting on the PCGS board (or here for that matter) is a privilege extended to you by the owners of said board. It can be revoked for any or no reason. If you PAID for said privledge, you might have a contractual right to continue or for a refund. You didn't pay.

Options are something you have in a capitalistic society (and in several other societal forms, sometimes with more restrictions). You have the option to take your money, your opinions and your body parts and go elsewhere.

That is a commercial issue. I think you are correct, that allowing a level of inteligent discourse related to their service and/or about their successes and failures would allow them to improve upon their services. But they don't have to allow anything but rah rah fanboy posts.

If you caught any of the threads that led to the bans, or read any of the side posts that referenced them, well, intelligent and related were not part.

 

We can't ban you UNTIL you create an account, but we do have the guys in the black helicopters on stand-bye.

Besides, we wouldn't ban you for being correct nor for being a blithering idiot, just for being an argumentative old sod.



What I love about these boards is you never know (at least until they show their coins) whether the blithering idiot you are arguing with is a billionaire or the night auditor at a fleabag motel. And it doesn't matter.

 

And, no, I'm not picking on a specific individual here... it's actually quite a nice hotel and I love him and his crazy coins!

 

The PCGS forums have been around for over 20 years. The rules and the way they have been moderated have changed a hundred times.

Before 2001 the site was like the wild west. You could create a thread just to call out the trolls and idiots that were there only to create problems. The members were allowed to help moderate the site without being banned, up to a point.
When the new board came out in 2001, they cleaned things up a bit.

In 2010 and 2011 Don Willis with PCGS, drew new lines and you would be banned if you crossed them. I had no problem with the rules.

When a really nasty thread gets started, you are at risk of being banned for just saying anything. Many get caught up in threads like this.

I have had a lot of friends that have been banned but none where they removed every post they ever made. Maybe that will be fixed.

 

In 2012, when I started collecting US coins again, I visited both NGC and PCGS websites and was mildly surprised they had active forums. My thought was the forums were marketing tools, and there could scarcely be free discussion in many areas, including grading services, dealers, auction houses, publishing houses, etc. It would be all too easy for a forum member to hurt business with a comment. That the forums are heavily moderated (censored if you like) is hardly surprising. If you participate in these forums, you're part of company marketing. That's not to say that your posts won't help the collecting community, they very well might. However, the forums exist because they are deemed to increase the bottom line of the businesses that own them.

Cal

 

Of course they were moderated every week and month and I saw questionable posts, threads and people with nothing to intelligently contribute dealt with in a timely fashion. Recently Insider and others were banned for a couple weeks, who have consistently posted thoughtful numismatically relevant material on a daily and weekly basis. Completely uncalled for and frankly disgusting.

If you want collectors and dealers to be living in fear of being kicked off at any moment, then the type of aggressive deletion strategy of Ms. Boyd will elicit dumbed down, ditto head, "positive" posts without the type of honest critical thinking that makes a free and open society viable. You cut out, intellectually assassinate as it were, censoring valuable contributions and what you are going to have are forums that are a shell of their former self. It is dehumanizing to live under ruthless censors. I can understand that for profanity, hateful, abusive, dishonest and intimidating rhetoric, but not for honest, reality-based posts centered at historical information which numismatics is rich with. I frankly doubt that Ms. Boyd has much "skin in the game" except for her employment at a company. Most of us have handled, bought and sold considerable value in this hobby, enjoy it, want it to remain open and inviting to the next generation; not a monopoly controlled by a few individuals who rule their fiefdom with an iron fist.

 

Heather don't play,
that's all I'll say.
Don't be a fool.
go by the rules.

 

There have been quite a few numismatic discoveries made on the PCGS forum in threads that should be saved for historical value.

Most of Roger's posts were related to numismatic research, and many were research in progress, with expert contributions that ended up in articles and books.

Deleting Roger's contributions to the PCGS forum is the same as historical attempts to burn books.

 

Seems more like collateral damage to me. Like foreclosing on someone's house because he wouldn't take down the yard signs that were against HOA regulations, and then hauling off his reference library in a dumpster.

 

I don't know why all of Roger's threads were removed, but it is possible he may have requested it.

 

Heather posted this.
"The deletion of their content was an unfortunate misstep. Content is not usually deleted during a ban and remains when an account is unbanned. Moving forward, account content will not be deleted upon a ban."
No answer if the information can be restored.

 

Of course there was some moderation, but it was easily one of the loosest in terms of what was allowed. There were countless flame wars, company bashing, posting of addresses because someone felt they were scammed ect. There was A LOT of leeway that other forums including this one wouldn't have allowed.

I'm aware of what had happened with them. I actually like most of the posters it happened to as well, but what did you expect to happen? The first page of the forum had turned into a page about disagree threads and the last thing the PCGS and CU powers that be want is to be inundated with emails about the forum and disagrees because of someone trolling on their alt. Several people tried to say to just let it go and by reacting the troll had won, it seemed pretty clear to me that account was just trying to get under peoples skin and seemed to have something against TDN.

Heather appeared on the forum not long after all that happened and I do think that whole fiasco was very likely a contributing factor into why she now has to watch the forum. I would bet she would much rather be working on marketing initiatives than moderating the CU board.

Not even remotely close to the same thing. You can't even actually permanently delete something from the internet anyway.

 

This explanation is far more grandiloquent than it needs to be. Typical corporate blather.
Somebody should get the Pulitzer for it.

 

This may/will be a boon for CT.

 

Should objectionable, off topic comments be deleted on dedicated hobby forums, so that offended people would hopefully feel better about fellow collectors, in the long run, who may have lost their tempers? Yes of course. And they should be warned about objectionable content and the reasons for the problem(s). If two or more members complain, as a moderator I would take someone's problem content as worth looking into and deleting possibly and warning the member. Have I posted stuff that I later regret on this and other forums? Definitely. And when my head was cooler I tried to get stuff deleted, and they have a policy here to not censor even at the poster's request often.

NGC has good systems of warning members on their forum of problems, usually one person attacking another or calling names. That is totally justified. They have time outs, for a week or more. Makes sense to me. Coin Community forum is another good resource, collegial and that is more my speed, the old gentleman's club where things could be discussed in an dispassionate and reasonable manner. I believe we are on earth to hopefully help one another as much as possible.