I am also a little bit disturbed about an entire thread and 10+ posts in another simply disappearing with no trace. It makes perfect sense that the site originally hosting the information would take it down immediately. But CD is a more or less unaffiliated community space, where we would not expect certain party's special interests to be protected by censorship. If the censored material were related to some of the more important issues discussed on these boards, it would obviously not be OK to slant the discussion and community's awareness like this. As it was, the offending material was relatively harmless and frivolous, and I'm not terribly upset. But it still gives me a little bit of a bad feeling.
It's also my gut feeling that this is not a matter of consensus among the mods. For one, there are so many that there is likely never a perfect consensus to be found. But also, I think many of them would share the sentiment that removing these discussions is not something we want to happen. But of course it only takes a few mods who disagree to go ahead and take it down. I hope that they are not acting on behalf of the relevant parties.
EDIT: In the time between clicking reply and making my first post, several people made their own posts. Several have since posted as well (in particular, thanks GKrotkov for pointing to some relevant forum rules). Having had a chance to read these, I see a very strong case for the censorship as well. It is important to the FRC community to maintain kickoff hype and to abide by FIRST's policies for information release. Jessica gives some great examples of past precedent that I didn't make the effort to search out. Finally, I don't think any mods were acting to cover someone's butt as I made it seem in my above post. Their intentions are in fact in the community's interest.
I'm totally fine with the information in question being suppressed. I just get a little shaken up when my posts go missing
