So I'm currently out of town for the holiday, and I peek in to GR - and the thread on Deletions has a GR mod who's still there (after more than one comment!) and actually responding to questions. Instead of just saying one thing and going away and leaving the thread. After months of being ignored, there are actually responses to questions. (It is pathetic that I think this is amazing. That's how sad user-GR communication is at this point.) Well, I got one answer at least - and that's the first I've had since the whole deletion thing. I'm kind of in shock, since I'm used to the mods ignoring my questions.

Feedback Discussion: Deleted Reviews

Sample from multiple Mod posts:

"We made some mistakes when we first implemented this policy, and for that we’re very sorry. It was wrong to say that we would moderate based on intentions. To give you some context, we have confirmed that 6 shelves were deleted by mistake. We have let the members concerned know about this, and have apologized.

We will not moderate shelves this way, and to be clear this isn’t part of our review guidelines. 

 

...Again, we shouldn’t have deleted “due-to-author” - we’re sorry about that. We noted that in our FAQ. As for the P2P shelves, it sounds like there might be some misinformation out there. We didn’t remove any shelves that referenced P2P, as those are within our guidelines. Reviews that mention the fact that a book was pulled-to-publish also are fine to post - those reviews are about the book. 

 

...If a review breaks our rules, then we will notify you and send you a backup of the content for your personal records." 

Note, I'm not expecting anything to change, but I at least have confirmation that I won't go away and then return to find something I've posted on GR deleted without notice.

At least this isn't yet another thread that everyone at GR is ignoring. I'm wondering if this poor mod drew the short straw in the office and this is penance for something, or if there're actually going to be regular mod responses in all the Feedback threads now. Or maybe they finally hired more people that will be needed to do all the review-policing that the policy will require.