Once a comment is deleted, it's removed from the site entirely and we no longer have access to any information about it. However, even if a comment hasn't been deleted, we have extremely limited information about it, particularly if it was made in a journal or community without IP logging enabled. Most people who leave this sort of comment also use a VPN service, so even if IP logging was enabled at the time a comment was made, sadly there is often very little that anyone (even us) can do to determine who left it.
This sort of thing is, unfortunately, a common issue in anonymous discussion communities, especially those that are dedicated to gossip about others or to documenting the behavior of specific individuals, and it's why those sorts of communities need to be heavily modded with as much coverage as possible to react to comments that violate the Terms of Service and the community rules as quickly as possible. You're already using the reporting system we recommend -- a dedicated thread or post for people to alert you to comments that violate the Terms of Service -- but you may also want to consider having multiple admins who all receive notifications when someone reports a comment and can take action on it. (The way we recommend doing this is adding multiple admins of the community; don't share the password to a single admin account with multiple people.) Adding multiple admins can be a risk, because every admin of a community has equal rights to delete comments, change community settings, delete the community, and/or remove other admins of the community, so you should only add admins you trust to not abuse the control over the community that an admin has; however, having multiple admins who are all able to handle reports of comments that violate the Terms of Service can allow you to make sure that it's more likely someone will be available to handle a violating comment more quickly.
Ultimately, however, running an anonymous discussion community does involve attracting a number of individuals who are inclined to go further in discussing someone's actions than the community rules or the Terms of Service allow, and we are very limited in what we can do to prevent someone from anonymously accessing the site or from leaving anonymous comments in a specific community. The prevalence of VPNs and other forms of connection masking makes it difficult if not impossible to proactively handle people who are not inclined to follow the rules.
If you have ongoing problems with people who are disinclined to follow the rules, we recommend that you enable comment IP logging and leave it enabled, enable the setting that requires all comments to the community to solve a captcha in order to comment, and -- at times of particularly high-volume issues -- enable comment screening for all comments so that you need to review a comment and make it visible before anyone but admins can see it. This won't stop particularly determined bad actors, but it will at least minimize the damage.
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(frozen comment) Re: The Dakkokki Doc
"Hi there!
Once a comment is deleted, it's removed from the site entirely and we no longer have access to any information about it. However, even if a comment hasn't been deleted, we have extremely limited information about it, particularly if it was made in a journal or community without IP logging enabled. Most people who leave this sort of comment also use a VPN service, so even if IP logging was enabled at the time a comment was made, sadly there is often very little that anyone (even us) can do to determine who left it.
This sort of thing is, unfortunately, a common issue in anonymous discussion communities, especially those that are dedicated to gossip about others or to documenting the behavior of specific individuals, and it's why those sorts of communities need to be heavily modded with as much coverage as possible to react to comments that violate the Terms of Service and the community rules as quickly as possible. You're already using the reporting system we recommend -- a dedicated thread or post for people to alert you to comments that violate the Terms of Service -- but you may also want to consider having multiple admins who all receive notifications when someone reports a comment and can take action on it. (The way we recommend doing this is adding multiple admins of the community; don't share the password to a single admin account with multiple people.) Adding multiple admins can be a risk, because every admin of a community has equal rights to delete comments, change community settings, delete the community, and/or remove other admins of the community, so you should only add admins you trust to not abuse the control over the community that an admin has; however, having multiple admins who are all able to handle reports of comments that violate the Terms of Service can allow you to make sure that it's more likely someone will be available to handle a violating comment more quickly.
Ultimately, however, running an anonymous discussion community does involve attracting a number of individuals who are inclined to go further in discussing someone's actions than the community rules or the Terms of Service allow, and we are very limited in what we can do to prevent someone from anonymously accessing the site or from leaving anonymous comments in a specific community. The prevalence of VPNs and other forms of connection masking makes it difficult if not impossible to proactively handle people who are not inclined to follow the rules.
If you have ongoing problems with people who are disinclined to follow the rules, we recommend that you enable comment IP logging and leave it enabled, enable the setting that requires all comments to the community to solve a captcha in order to comment, and -- at times of particularly high-volume issues -- enable comment screening for all comments so that you need to review a comment and make it visible before anyone but admins can see it. This won't stop particularly determined bad actors, but it will at least minimize the damage.
Best,
Denise "