Just for the sake of transparency, there was a thread calling for all people to have their real names shown. I responded in the thread that it's not a thing that's going to happen.
Mostly the thread was a wall of people saying "Yeah, no" in a variety of forms to the idea. I don't expect the thread will be missed.
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As to the question of "Are threads/posts Deleted?", the answer is no. There's a "Hide" feature which allows the contents of the posts to remain available. Mostly, if a post or thread is hidden it's because of a rule violation or because it was just responding to a rule violation. When the source of the problem is Hidden, the other posts may no longer make sense.
Having things Hidden allows for better record-keeping in regards to Warnings and Suspensions and such.
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For those curious how many things are Hidden on an average day, it's usually less then 5-10 posts. For the most part, the Community here has figured out the forum's general vibe and people are just hangin' out. Some like X, others dislike Y, but people are really quite respectful in how they talk about most things.
I recently found out how to run the numbers on "Posts Per Day" and we sit around 700+ on average, so the amount of moderation required is remarkably small.