As this was a story of interest to the expat community in Qatar I posted a link to it on the popular website Qatar Living. Within a few minutes the entire thread had been deleted from the Qatar Living website without any message to me from the person who did it, there wasn’t even a marker stating that the thread had been deleted.

I then posted a complaint on the forum about the manner of the deletion and got a response from another site user. Within minutes of this that thread was also deleted without trace. I then followed this up with a message exchange with the ‘Moderator’ in which I was advised that the subject was ‘sensitive’ and there were concerns about the site being blocked by the ISP in Qatar. This was despite the fact that the original site and an extremely interesting Stratfor report on the same story were passing unopposed through the ISP (Q-Tel) firewall. I assume the Arabic websites were also unaffected.

The prospect of being blocked by Q-Tel isn’t something to be taken lightly out here. The administrators of the firewall seem to randomly block websites and it is near to impossible to get in contact with them. The email address posted on the block message appears to be a joke in that I have yet to hear of someone getting a response from it when they have complained. At the moment http://www.google.com is completely broken – any and all queries result in the original Google page being redisplayed and a search on any Google website including the word ‘Canal’ results in the response being blocked (I was searching for ‘Corinth Canal’ at the time).

At the time of writing this there is at least one extremely active forum on Qatar living where many users are letting off steam about the issue and the way that threads and messages are being deleted. I estimate that about 10% of new threads in the forum area of the website are being deleted at present.

There are several issues with all this. Qatar Living is a website based on a server in the USA and is probably in the top 20 of websites visited from Qatar. It has a large and extremely vocal userbase who use it for everything from discussing the weather (its hot and dusty) to selling unwanted furniture.

Whilst the users don’t pay for the service of the website (it is financed by advertising) – without them the site is worthless and quite a lot of the most active users are extremely unhappy at the moment.

The site does not have a clear policy of what topics are acceptable to the administrators and which are not. This results in a clash in expectations and some extremely public arguments on its forums.

Deleting threads without notice or explanation is extremely upsetting to users who feel protective about what they are writing and strongly object to censorship being applied to them by an unknown party.

The story in this case of a coup plot is extremly relevant to the users of Qatar Living and has been published in the press outside Qatar. The story is in the public domain and a much better way to handle the entire situation would have been to put a short note in the News section of the site referring to the stories in the foreign press and containing a request that it is not discussed in the forums because of concerns about the Q-Tel firewall. This would at a single stroke have defused the situation and would have put the entire userbase of the site on the same side as the site admins.

The problem with self censorship is the fear factor results in the press and other organisations being overcautious in what they publish and they do not challenge the ‘official censor’ in their interpretation of the regulations.

I do feel sympathetic for the administrators of Qatar Living in that they have spent a long time building up the site to its current position and they don’t wish to risk their investment. However I feel they have made a big mistake in the way that they handled this situation and the site has lost a lot of credibility as a result. If enough people become disillusioned then there is a danger of them moving to another site which would compete with Qatar Living.

One message I got from the unknown ‘Moderator’ on Qatar Living was “Why don’t you publish it in your own blog?”. Well Mr Moderator, I have