Just out of interest, how was it actually advertised?

In my early days of photography, before I had learned anything really, I experienced the feeling of "I want to take a picture but I can't think of a subject" and it does take a bit of time and effort to get over that.

These days I don't really wander about hoping for an image, but usually go out looking for something that I wanted to shoot, for one purpose or another.

As a start though, combining another hobby with photography is useful. For example, you might be a dentist and could start with clinical photography, or a book collector photographing a collection. Whatever it is, you then learn those vital techniques and the creative aspects follow.

Looking at lots of images for inspiration is also a great way to learn to really see the world around you.

That's an interesting Catch 22 situation, but don't forget that everyone has a right to be treated properly and we're here to help ensure that that happens.

Now I know some forums, indeed one that I frequent quite a bit, nothing to do with photography, where I constantly urge my fellow moderators not to be so trigger-happy. They can be quite as touchy as some of the posters!

Having said that, attacks on a forum by trolls do occur and have to be dealt with, otherwise the whole place becomes inflamed with anger. We've been very lucky here to avoid this.

Now by all means discuss whatever you want, and I would point out that nobody, apart from one rather excessive post, has been stopped from saying anything, so there really is no attack on anyone's freedoms! But when it becomes personal or when it's just an unpleasant argument going round in circles, then that's the time it may well be stopped.

With respect, you cannot judge a post that you haven't read. The last time a post was removed for this reason it was a truly shocking attack. This is not censorship, and it confuses the issue to discuss it as such.
The danger was in publishing potentially libellous material, apart from causing unnecessary distress to the attacked person.

Unfortunately you can't judge a thread either, as posters can edit and delete their posts at any time, so after the event things could change. At that point things would no longer make any sort of sense. I'm not saying it has happened here, but it could.

In this case it was not so severe, but still out of order. That's what moderation is for and in future it can be discussed I think by PM rather than in public. If I reinstated the post so we could all see it would not be a good thing to do, and you might not like it much.

Fortunately this sort of thing is very rare here, but where necessary posts are removed, quite properly. In the entire history of this site there have been very very few occasions where some sort of action has been taken.

The worst thing is prolonging it, and it's time now to stop.

Won't do much to make anyone want to visit London.

Very fair question.

I judge competitions, and look for emotional content. The ability to take a sharp well exposed image is the logical part, well suited to images of catalogue items or pictures for eBay. The extra dimension is the feeling in the image, the message. The aesthetic quality?

So perhaps first we should look to what we want to express and then the technical ability to translate that into the actual photograph?

I'm sure it's tremendous fun, but also unhelpful and I expect that you're wondering how long my patience will hold...there was a similar trend when the forum design was changed and we listened to some pretty dreadful stuff then.

But to summarise, whether or not the original thread should have been locked is now immaterial. It wasn't deleted, just the brakes put on before it moved into a fight. Nothing was removed, unless of course any of the posters removed some of their own stuff. It that's the case then it will no longer make sense anyway.

What was removed from here was a very inflammatory and personal post, not directed at me as it happens, but to reinstate it would not really be very helpful and I think regretted by some. The relpy to it was removed because in isolation it made no sense so was redundant.

Censorship is removing the ability of someone to state an opinion, and I think it's pretty clear by now that you're free here to state your opinion. However, you are not free to launch personal attacks on other members or to post potentially libellous material.

Hopefully common sense will now reinstate itself and we can move back to discussing photographic subjects.

Totally agree. What has been censored here?

The problem could be that all you could get as recompense would be a refund. Then you wouldn't have a camera for £299.00

It would be different if they could replace it, but if there really are no more...

In days of yore, so to speak, it was common practice to put an IR correction mark on lenses. It fell by the wayside when zooms became common and masses of markings for a couple of selected focal lengths were perhaps unwieldy.