What does it mean when all we see is "response moderated"?

I always get the feeling it means “some serious shit went down, and, hey, look over there!”, but I’m not sure.

Most likely the response was part of a bulk deletion. Spammers, for instance, might post 30 identical responses to 30 different questions. We then use a tool to remove them all at once. Unlike the normal interface, the bulk deletion tool does not request a reason.

@SavoirFaire Any other reasons? I know I’ve seen a few that weren’t spam.

Spam was just an example. Any bulk deletion will result in spaces that just say “response moderated.” The other possibility is that someone forgot to mark a reason when removing a post. We have an “other” option, so it could just be an accident sometimes.

I always wondered this myself. Bulk deletion makes some sense, but say in a heated debate with like five to ten moderated posts in a row, after a flame war and such, I’ve seen some that were all labeled. Maybe it’s for a reason that doesn’t quite apply for the existing reasons? :/
Or maybe the moderator who deleted it just didn’t click on any choices, for whatever reason.

If someone has a lot of posts to moderate and is just trying to run through them all, s/he might forget or not bother to click on reasons. I suppose we might sometimes use discretion for the sake of the members involved as well. My experience as a moderator here is still rather limited, however, so I’d be moving into the realm of pure speculation if I said much more.

Makes sense.

If you see a lot of them in a row, my guess is it’s on an old question. Moderated responses used to look altogether different than they do now. It used to be that you could see whose response was removed, and it would just say “Removed by Fluther moderators”. When we switched to the current system, all of the old ones got a bulk application of “response moderated”.

“Just because?”
Maybe it simply leaves a sour taste & it doesn’t require a “label.”