Thanks for the explanation. At least now I know I'm not going crazy and just imagining reading these things.

I don't have any problem with the rules, however, I do see a problem with this approach. If these post are just deleted without any warning or explanation, how are people supposed to know which topics are out of the scope of this forum? For example, I just posted another topic to find out what happened, and it already seemed to go back to the topic of gold/silver/bartering. I doubt if anybody suspected the topic itself is reason for it being deleted. At least if a thread were locked with a reason given, then there would be less confusion (i.e. is discussing silver/gold coins forbidden? barter? or using silver/gold for bartering?) It's not like I have a strong interest in the subject, it just happened to be the one of a few topics that I can remember that has gone missing

Also, FYI, even though the topic has been deleted, it still shows up in the search engines and I can still pull up a cached version of it.