I think the derail happened after the RFC discussion was already dead so I don’t think there was an intent to sabotage. I think it was more an attempt to end the discussion on a pleasant note / perhaps even with some reconciliation.
Ah, that’s a possibility. I’m still readapting to not having Modvision and being able to see things like that, I got pretty used to seeing notes in threads saying “1 deleted post” so when I don’t see them now I still assume there are none.
Then excise it to the mod log. It causes more bickering if we can’t easily cite the posts that we are arguing about. What we are doing is like relying on the police report and deleting the body cam footage.
We could take one of the good things from 4chan by using Staff Notices to just add a “USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST” type note to posts if they’re not something deletion worthy.