Originally Posted by Dolgubon
Yes, addon authors can delete comments. As an addon author yourself, you might have noticed that/you'd be able to check. I've actually done it myself before, (a comment that was quite clearly not related) but it's definitely not something that I have a habit of doing. I imagine the idea behind addon authors being able to delete comments on their own addons is that they are able to keep it on topic/related to the addon, and/or to prevent other players from being a nuisance. It would likely be a lot more work for the site admins to moderate the comments of every single addon. In general, I don't think addon authors abuse their power - there's many comments around the site that I'm sure the addon author would prefer did not exist. Generally though, they get buried pretty quickly, just because other people post comments.
I'd also like to point out that, while I did not see the actual comment, this short quote of yours: is likely something that I would say an author is completely within their rights to delete. (Of course, I admit I have no context on that. Maybe it was an ok comment) While pointing out security flaws is perfectly fine, you also need to consider how you point them out. I don't know for sure if the addon you are referring to is Nirn Auction House, but if it is, I'd also like to point out that quickly checking shows there are multiple other comments warning about security - so it seems likely that censorship was not the reason for deleting your comments.
.exes are a security risk, and I'm not going to say that they aren't. Depending on the specific addon you are referring to, the source code might be freely available. Additionally, the site has rules around .exes: "Executable files are not allowed, except for some very specific cases. We test and decompile all executable files that are submitted. In some cases we may ask for the source. This processes could take awhile." That said, I don't know how rigorous the testing they are put through is.
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Well, i agree with a few things and disagree with some of the things you wrote.
Let's start with the comment where i got quoted "blah-blah-blah". I never wrote that.
I must agree, that my words could have been friendlier (but it was quite a bit hard as i got pretty much too tired of people defending all of this without any arguments, respectively ignoring everything that has been said. I mean if someone really wants to run that addon, fine for me. I wouldn't. And everyone who wants to run it should know what the risks are. And there are quite a few.). Nonetheless, the post contains information and what I currently consider to be an issue in the comments there. There's simply a lot of censorship and as you said, comments are getting buried rather quickly which is another issue in case of this addon.
Another example:
Got one more at home in case you want to see that as well. Unfortunately, the original post, where I've explained a lot of things got deleted and I did not make a screenshot (i didn't thought about it being deleted).
Regarding the other comments: they are mostly surfacing. The discussing on the official forums do contain more details imho. I was posting the things i was concerned about in my first deleted post (and it did contain more information than the other posts on the comments). But there's no reason to write it all again, when it gets deleted anyway, so I simply referred to the official forum (well, there's some censorship there as well, but at least the author isn't capable of deleting posts directly...).
Regarding the .exe:
If you do not decompile the binaries you won't be able to determine if they have been built from that source. So a simple source code review won't be enough. Besides the source code shows that the local lua files are being regularly overwritten by the content delivered by the (closed source) web server (again, a review of that source won't help much).
And exactly such comments are being deleted. If you look on how the author is handling criticism and feedback in general (he mostly dodges, ignores or deletes such statements) this whole thing looks even worse.
Yet, when you look at the addon comments, you will miss out on many things.
I understand that the admins can't take control of everything, but this form of censorship is pretty bad. It should be possible to prevent authors to delete comments if they abuse that feature. If anything is wrong with this addon (e.g. malware) I consider the admins being responsible for the damage caused as well, as they a) allowed the addon b) prevented other users from being warned.