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> On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator.

> After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion.

Missed an opportunity here to gaslight them: restore the site from backup every eight hours.

I truly do wonder how that would have turned out. Would they have figured out what was going on?

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Very interesting idea. I would imagine yes but maybe not at first ?

It's hard to figure out unless they had persistent memory elsewhere.

The reason they could tell that a message was deleted is because the existence of a "message deleted" message is itself a message telling them they are be moderated. The lack of this message may make it impossible to determine if this is the first attempt at comms or the 1000th.

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