Yeah, I did see some of them were captured, hence why I said about scrapers potentially not having scraped all of them yet. I found a few posts which were sort of duplicates, and very low quality. So, I knew the type of posts most of them were, even though there was no edit history scraped on quite a lot of them. Also, not sure how they went amiss at the time of being posted, because that's a lot of threads being posted in a rather short period of time. However, it was also at one of the time's the Altcoin section was at its busiest, so that probably contributed. 2017-2018 was by far the biggest spam wave we've ever seen.
Does this forum save the history of edited posts? Or what we see in live is the only data that this forum holds? If the second one is true, then I think it carries 0 benefit to keep these posts on forum. It's all edited and we can't see what was written at past.
If there are still ways to track these persons in case something happens, then that's good but how can they be tracked if their data before posts were edited aren't saved?
Yeah, the edited posts are very likely in the backups, and the admins probably have a fairly easy way of looking at the edited posts history. However, normal moderators don't. I'm not sure, if Global Moderators have more access to this sort of information, but I don't think they do. Maybe, it would be useful if all moderators could check this information though, it'd allow us to make more informed decisions.
Generally, I don't tend to rely too much on web scrapers, because there's potential for issues there. However, I don't personally see the significance of a lot of these threads, when they were likely all low quality to begin with. Although, this might be a conversation to be had behind the scenes, and potentially change our view points in order to have more cohesion. Like I said, I don't take complaints as being hostile, I just see it as a opportunity to evaluate, and look at other perspectives.
This attitude to old posts is not clear to me, so this garbage accumulates and accumulates, accumulates and accumulates, endlessly. After all, no one forbids putting it in order, especially since I do not force anyone to do this and waste their time.
I think it varies, there's too my knowledge no guidance on not deleting of old posts, to me if it's spam, it's spam, and will be removed. However, I can see why other moderators might think different. Personally, I just want my sections to be as clean as possible, and a lot of what I'd consider significant, i.e having a decent amount of history are covered in "great project!" type posts, which I always remove.
Generally though, reports of recent posts are much more valuable, than older one's. I think theymos has said at one point, that not all reports are of the same quality. So, while some users may have 2k reports of older, less seen posts they're not the same quality as someone who has 1k reports of more frequently exposed posts. However, my point of view is they're both valuable. I revisit old threads from time to time, and I imagine a few users do with old Altcoin threads.