the only reason comments would disappear without modlog entry would be a community or instance ban with the remove content checkbox selected. the only other option would be purging content, which is only available to people with the admin tag and we don't use this anyway. it would also leave purge modlog entries. the lack of modlog entries not existing for community bans is a lemmy issue, not specific to LW.

you can find your community bans here: https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModBanFromCommunity&userId=239118

it's not as much about the removal of those comments being the issue in and of itself for us currently, but that this is being done by a person in his position. we haven't really been enforcing any special rules for moderator behavior on LW in the past (hence also currently considering a mod CoC), but having a member of our team incorrectly accusing people of lying and spreading misinformation on their own, even after seeing arguments for why he's in the wrong is very much a step too far. i wasn't directly involved in the discussion back then, so i don't know the entire message history, but it was my understanding that he would at least stop with those claims, if he wasn't able to apologize for it.

there were several recent reports, including private ones. also, just because you may not see something, it doesn't mean that nothing is happening. we have already discussed topics like the Canadian politics one with him in the past, as we also don't consider it acceptable what he did back then.

we have started looking into reports about jordan a few days ago, and we have already identified several occasions where he has been acting in ways that we don't consider to be acceptable for a member of our community team. it may still take us a few more days to come to final conclusions for how we will proceed with this, as this is something that needs time for a proper review and discussions within the team. we all have lives outside of lemmy, where we need and want to spend our time, and something like this takes hours to properly review.

one of the things we have already discussed will be establishing an internal CoC for community team members and people higher up in the team, which includes ensuring that we keep a certain level of professionalism in our interactions, even if another party doesn't. we're obviously all humans, but that doesn't mean we don't have responsibility for our actions, especially if it's not a one-off thing. we will also consider if this may be something to establish for community moderators in general, but for now our primary focus is on people in positions above a regular user or moderator.

the implementation that piefed used to use made it trivial to link them to the original users, yes. this was an implementation flaw that could easily be addressed, which would make it less trivial to do so, mostly turning it into a probability assessment when correlating with other activity, provided that the pseudonymous identity is permanently tied to the real user.

as @[email protected] mentioned, we don't care about usage of multiple accounts generally.

we do prohibit the same person voting on content (their own or others') with multiple accounts, and obviously using multiple accounts for ban evasion is not allowed. spamming a community with multiple accounts pretending to be different persons should also be avoided unless the community explicitly allows it, which seems to how you want to do it based on your description.

you could save some storage with this, but i don't think it's a good idea. a lot of people expect the threadiverse to have a lot more permanence than e.g. mastodon, similar to reddit. being able to find old posts/comments about a certain topic is one of the things that made reddit as useful as it used to be, especially when searching for tech related issues in my experience. old doesn't necessarily mean obsolete, and whether this would be suitable would be highly dependent on the community. most communities are not intended to be for ephemeral content only.

what would that have to do with this?

to be honest, this should have been done way earlier.

the domain you posted a link to was in our automod blacklist due to previously being used by spam bots.

upon review it appears that this domain serves user generated content by different users that can be determined in the URL path. in those cases we typically only ban those users rather than the entire site if it's not overly spammy.

we also usually review automod actions quickly, although in this specific case we must have missed this, as we had a lot of other true spam removals in the last days.

you have been unbanned from LW and your post has been restored.

not at all. nobody can revert edits, only the creator can edit it again.

moderators can restore removed (mod action) posts and comments, but not deleted (creator action) posts and comments.

this comment section is not a place to rant about other instances