Currently the forum has 2 active moderators (PerRock and me). On paper there are more (mostly language forums related), but some are MIA. All moderators are volunteers. As in "we do not get paid for the sometimes crappy job we get to do".
Next to that (or on top of that) there is of course Zec, but he is administrator and employee of N3V.
Technically you can contact us as we are also members of the community so you could start a "conversation" with us (click on the little envelope in the top right corner).
The CoC rule 19 effectively gives us the option to totally ignore any discussion (or "conversation") about our decisions and even gives us the option to throw infractions your way.
All though some people disagree, we moderators are all humans, which means we are able to make mistakes. The good news for you is that when we make the mistake of deleting something, it is actually only not visible for you anymore and all forum staff members can un-delete it. It would not be the first time I deleted something only to make it show up again a few minutes or a day later; usually because there is a link in the post and I think its SPAM. But also the other way around happens; approving something only to discover later someone post the exact same thing a few times already (or someone found a new way to include spam).
As I just finished going over 2600 posts that were never deleted or approved (or even in many cases unapproved instead of deleted), dating from 2008 all the way to earlier this week, I have no doubt I might have made a mistake or two.
In your case:
You can
blame me for deleting it.
Everyone can blame me for everything that is wrong in the world
(and you would be surprised what idiotic things I have been blamed of), but in this case I actually did it.
Let me continue writing a big wall of text, that way it is more likely to be taken out of context and some people will blame me of more stuff, but in this case I am doing it with the intention to clarify stuff
.
I think you were one of the 50+ topics suggesting to restore "Paint Shed" in one way or another and/or "make it easy to reskin stuff" in some way.
N3V rarely makes content. I think they (or Auran even) did in the very early stages (around the time of Paint Shed) make some stuff, but nowadays it is extremely rare and usually only technical. All content is made by various brilliant (and sometimes less brilliant) people, most of them freely uploading it to the DLS for everyone to enjoy it. They all use various techniques and creation software and usually only following their own standards, and on top of that they are created for various versions of Trainz (2004 standards up to now). As a result, creating a generic piece of software that makes reskinning easy is extremely hard if not impossible to do.
In short:
That is very unlikely to happen.
Loads of topics about the same or similar stuff were deleted or locked before someone decided it was a smart idea to make me moderator, so I simply followed that line of reactions and deleted it.
Now here comes the funny thing:
Because I can not really delete things, the things I delete only acts like they are deleted for you. All N3V staff can still read it (and I am sure at least Zec will). The main thing is you all don't get to have the 50+th discussion about
Paint Shed.
So if your idea was indeed brilliant or really stupid or it has been suggested many times before, it will likely stay "deleted". But if Zec things "silly moderator, of course we need to have a discussion about this" because he thinks it is indeed different, it might just show up again one of these days.
Right.
I think with that I have used up all the energy I had to discuss moderator discissions for the next month or so, so please don't be surprised if the next discussion will simply be ignored, locked, deleted or, if it is really bad, slapped with a "CoC rule 19". But you got your explanation.
Have a great weekend all!
