In any case, OP, if you want to thank someone in a post (and I hate to even suggest this), perhaps try padding the post a little bit with more content. At least then it's not likely to get reported and deleted. And yes, moderation here is strict as far as low-value posts go.
This is even worse in my opinion and it's what we saw when campaigns started requiring minimum character counts on their posts. Users will just fluff their posts to meet the minimum making their posts even more unsubstantial and spammy when it should be analysed on the content of the post.
I see it simply as a means to ensure some lazy mod gets paid. And by lazy - I do not necessarily mean they do nothing but that that what they are doing is being done lazily - without actually understanding what is being done - simple "hey they said thank you - delete that fucking spam!" - is maybe suitable elsewhere on the forums but it is not that cut/dry here in collectibles.
And if they do not understand that - then they should not be moderating this area of the forums. Let them get paid for deleting spam elsewhere.
I doubt that this is the case. Staff aren't paid on a per deleted post basis and you could probably delete a thousand posts and it wouldn't make a difference to their pay. It's more about how many reports you handle and given that these weren't even reported then it's a moot point. There's more than enough reports to handle and staff really don't need to go looking for extra things to do. I agree that these sorts of thank you posts should probably be left alone though as they're not doing any harm. I don't think just giving them merit is ideal either. Not everyone has that much merit to go around but anyone could build up a lot of merit just by doing giveaways and I'm sure people do that already, but it would become more prevalent if merit became the common way to thank people for a giveaway.
@mprep
Why is this bot being used to remove posts on self moderated threads? Doesn't self moderated mean self moderated??
A self-moderated thread wouldn't exclude it from being moderated by staff or abiding by the forum rules. Self-modded just means that the thread started can moderate it how they want and to be aware of that, but mods can and will enforce the rules there.