User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-188432-20121202033808/@comment-10370-20121202201200

Yes, what Randomtime says is correct. We want to keep as much "wiki spirit" as we can with the new features. Any contributor can clean up vandalism or spam on a wiki talk page, just by editing the page.

If we only let admins remove bad messages, then that would create a bottleneck -- people would have to go ask the admins every time something bad happened, instead of just fixing it themselves.

Admins do have some special powers -- they can restore a removed message with one click. Non-admins get the pop-up modal asking why they want to restore the message. This is a subtle "speed bump" for people who are trying to restore a bad comment.

Another piece of "wiki spirit" -- everything that happens with removing and restoring messages is in history, contributions and recent changes, so contributors can keep track of what's going on.

It's definitely a change, but it seems to work when you get used to it. How's it working for you?