I wish some of the food in china would make my bowels go numb at least until i get home. Sorry off topic but i just felt moved by what Yankee had posted.

One of the wisest and most successful people i was lucky enough to have called my mentor early in life advised me to remove to words from my vocabulary as he pointed out rarely will they be fair or accurate. Those words were always and never.

I tend to find extremely critical reviews somewhat helpful, as they together with more balanced reviews make up a whole. Also, BillDans reviews are rather enjoyable reads in their own right, and there's always grains of truth in them. I agree completely that Cacao is very overpriced, for example, and certainly do not feel I have some kind of obligation to give balanced reviews to restaurant owners just because they might have given "blood, tears and sweat" to build up a place, especially not if they choose to build a place solely intended for rich people. That being said, of course if the only review of a place is a completely biased one it won't be very helpful.

And I need to add for the record that you're all wrong: Kunming food is great, you can basically throw a stick and you'll find a good and affordable restaurant. But it won't be clean; learn to live with it.

@ Yereth

When you go about censoring people's posts, for whatever reason, you should make it clear that you indeed did so. I strongly disagree with your "Chinese" style censorship techniques. If you decide to delete ANY post, it should be done with full transparency in mind.

This means that at the very least, you should leave a post like "so and so's post has been deleted for (state a reason). This notifies members that a moderator has purpously deleted a post. For it to just vanish is terrible website management.

I have to side with BillDan about this. He should have every right to state his opinion, which all people in here are free to accept or disregard. If he looks to be attacking someone. isn't it up to the other party to respond? If he is trolling, or just being abusive, then sure you should delete the post in the way I suggested above. But BillDan should have the right to his opinion even if everybody else does not agree with it.

Shame on you Go Kunming!

As a moderator on another site, I have to side with silent deletion and no explanation. Usually people know why they have been deleted. But this requires a clear policy, and therin lies the transparency. It also requires a light moderating touch. If in doubt about moderation, wait, talk to another mod.

People get very territorial about thier posts and tend to go into self justification mode, especially if thier percieved transgression is made public. There then can follow a heated debate between the moderator and the moderated. The moderated rarely admiting any fault (esp now it is public). Things can often get very personal and abusive, and guess what, the moderators cannot really retaliate as they are the public face of the website.

Since the other website I mentioned introduced the silent moderation policy, we have much less aggro on the website, and much less moderation to do. On the other website all the mods are volunteers, we all have lives, and nobody deserves to be abused by anyone.

I think most people have been moderated on some website, some even banned. We got over it.

My two cents, from someone who is a moderator, has been moderated on here and other sites, and has also been banned from forums.

This forum is like 'easy listening' radio.

It's like real music with all the sticky bits removed.

still got you

huh?

hey, is cacao's rebuttal a violation of the mod policy? they accuse BillDan of having a 'coke issue'.

@bucko: Well said. I completely agree with you.

Bit of an odd reply actually- cums across as kind of angry, petty even. Certainly not very constructive, and nothing there that really needed saying.