I did not call anyone stupid - simply stated that to moderate requires thought and a functioning brain - if you have those, then my statement does not apply to you.

As for your question:

How, from a non-emotional and non-biased perspective, is someone posting a "thanks" for being able to participate in a raffle different from someone posting a "thanks" for an interesting post


Simple - the people that participated often in these raffles have paid to be part of the raffle or are partaking in a raffle where the participants pay nothing and the host is the one incurring the cost of gifting the item - often including free shipping. There is tangible - real world objects at stake with these raffles. Sometimes, the value can be quite high - take for example the last raffle involving the silver Litecoin wallet/block. The crypto value is 12.5 LTC, then add the value of the silver content - this is not a simple post of an "interesting" topic.

People posting "thanks" on an interesting topic, have put nothing into it. They simply read it.

That is why if someone is going to moderate the collectibles area, they need to understand that a blanket policy simply does not work.

Just a thought: a count down timer to self-delete a post would be a nice feature. Post "Thank you so much for doing this!", click "auto-delete in 24 hours", and in the corner of the posts a count down appears. For Mods it's obvious it isn't spam and will clean itself, and the user gets to say thanks without sending an unsolicited PM.

It seems like the actual problem here would be solved, like many of the forums problems, by eliminating signatures.  No signatures, greatly reduced incentive to spam, no need to have bots deleting suspected spam.