The name of the mod deleting should be transparent. If that is not going to happen you should be shown a percentage of deleted posts that have executed from each mod.
All that would do is lead to more crying and disgruntlement towards mods. We would have dozens of threads created a week like,
hilariousandco has removed three of my posts? Is this a personal attack? Blah blah blah. Names don't need to be shown. If you believe a post has been removed incorrectly or they're being removed often without reason and suspect a mod is abusing his power or attacking a person then create a thread about it or contact theymos. If mods were abusing their power and repeatedly removing posts for incorrect reasons it would be instantly apparent. Not only would theymos be able to see something is up but people cry here over one post being removed so imagine what would happen if mods were genuinely targeting people.
Do mods actually have the power to deprive the user of the usual notification by PM?
I have noted some examples of moderation that are clearly not impartial verging upon stalking and vindictive.
No, they don't. Timelord is just paranoid and biased and makes assumptions time and time again and this is all fuelled by his dislike of me merely because I excluded him from my trust-list due to his wildly inaccurate trust ratings. He also doesn't really know how this forum works because he assumes it was me or cyrus that removed a post because our names are on the sub boards. The only time a person won't get a notification is if the entire thread is removed.
The problem is the conflict of interests where moderators are paid by members here on this forum. It may not be immediately obvious to the poster that their post conflicts with the interests of a member that a moderator needs to keep happy. Hence, why the stats I mention, would be useful to track and analyse.
People aren't going to get special favours just because I'm on their campaign. If that was so and it was exposed and I'd almost certainly be removed as a moderator and that's not something I'm going to jeopardise so me having a signature is irrelevant to my moderation. You'd have a much more logical argument about us removing posts/handling reports since that's what we actually get paid to do but again, if we were abusing our power people would notice.
usually in my own threads that I have started (hence the replies are on topic).
So if you create a thread about cars and start talking about Dr Who that's on topic?
This was brought up some time ago IIRC, and I think there's an option not to notify the user.
On previous occasions, I did notice that my post count decreased by 1 or 2 but received no notifications when they happened.
This is incorrect. Staff do not have an option to do that. The only way you'd be missing posts without a notification is if an entire thread was trashed that you had posted in and they're usually only removed when they're a generic spam thread or something like that.