3) Do not spam the forums. Avoid posting recurring/excessive threads and make sure that any thread you open has something substantial to discuss from the beginning. When posting, make sure that you are not disruptive of the topic at hand. Nonsensical posts, posts created to start a flame war and post count inflation are also considered forms of spam.
Right from the topic you quoted, I believe this is the issue in question. Use some common sense and write posts that have some substance to them, and they won't get deleted. Don't play dumb like you don't know why it happened.
Let's look at the soda thread for example. You created a poll with a few sodas in it (which at least for me are not even very popular sodas). This was mostly fine. However, in the body of your post consisted of only "Very interesting poll, isn't it?" and a totally irrelevant soundclip. Your post had no substance whatsoever.
However, if the body of your post contained some or all of the following, I think it would not have been deleted:
- A question about which sodas are most popular in people's countries, explaining which are popular and yours and providing some background as to why such a topic interested you
- What your favorite soda was and why
- A justification of why the sodas you chose were included in the poll (where the hell is Coke? Mountain Dew?)
- A link to an article about soda (its affect on health or happiness, etc) and some analysis you wrote about it.
There are plenty of other things you could have done to make it a legitimate post. However, if you continue to post threads that have very little effort or substance put into them you will likely be banned. Time the ESOC staff spends moderating would be much better spent on organizing events, developing tournament and site features, or playing more AoE3. Low-quality posts significantly lower the quality of ESOC as a community not only because it lowers the average post quality on the site, but probably more so because it prevents us from actually spending time to improve the community.