Frig, I just lost my whole post because I was logged in under another account to test out my theory that blog comments might be able to be deleted by the person who posted them, then logged into my regular account in another window, and it screwed up this window! :)

Anyhow. Here's the deal with blogs at rabble.

Bloggers are hosting their own blogs on rabble. Bloggers have the ability to delete posts as a result. (I'm not saying that this is what happened in this case, since Judy hosts highly critical comments about her postings at her personal blog site and here, and there are lots of critical posts in that thread anyhow.)

But bloggers can moderate their blog comments as they see fit, and according to their own standards. This means that they may have different standards than babble around when a post might get deleted. People might delete posts for a variety of reasons - if they're insulting, they don't consider them to be useful to the debate, abusive, whatever. And they may have different standards than you do when it comes to what constitutes abusive, insulting, etc.

They might also delete a comment upon request from the person commenting, or if the poster deletes the post except for one character, which one of our staff noticed in a blog posting recently and then deleted it for them. We have no idea what happened in this case because we don't have anything to go on beyond a claim that a couple of posts, from unnamed posters, were deleted. If the people whose posts were lost contact us, we'll look into it further.

But what it comes down to is this: if you want to make absolutely sure your post stays intact, post it on babble, where there is a pretty standard policy of not deleting posts unless they cross the bounds of legality or spam.

P.S. Just spoke with Judy - she didn't delete anyone's posts and neither has anyone on staff.