Why is it such a big freaking issue on here? A question could be put under Life & Society, but could also fit in Relatinships, Family, Health etc. I swear! I have never ran across anything like this in all the sites I’ve ever been on.
For many, there is an expectation that questions be searched easily, so that people with an interest n a certain kind of question can find it easily. The categorizes are part of the infrastructure, and therefore have to be maintained to some degree by us. If there are multiple categories something can belong to, it usually gets left alone, unless one category stands out as being a significantly more valid choice. Moving them from one place to another is unavoidable from time to time, but it's necessary to maintain order. Ergo, "asking permission" is out. It's infrastructure-related and we have to maintain it.
I believe in protecting the integrity of the content/ preserving discussions as they are. If you write something, your words should (in general) remain the same and within the context of how you've said them. Categories aren't part of that. Moving a question doesn't change what you mean. I'm willing to bet most people don't even notice when something of theirs has been moved. We do let people know when they have a lot of stuff getting moved, but it's only of a standpoint of "Hey, we saw this. We'd like to get on the same page with where things like this belong." In my experience, most people want to follow a standard procedure, provided they know what it is. Some sensitive folks don't even take that much well.
Everyone who helps with the site- moderators, admin, category managers- are all volunteers. From a time standpoint, I don't think it's fair to give volunteers even more work like sending out emails for every single move. There's so little value in it- it's just extra work for people who don't get paid to help out anyway.
As an aside to that, we already get crap about sending emails for valid TOS-violating removals/ edits. Although we do our best to address it from a nonchalant coaching/ guiding standpoint, people are still sensitive to it. They feel "reprimanded" or "treated like a child" or "chastised" even when the email we send just says "Hey, we saw XYZ. It violates the TOS, so we removed it. Please be mindful of this in the future." Unless someone has a lot of category issues, I think messaging for every "whoops" is a bit nit-picky. I don't want to henpeck everything/ everyone, and I think most don't want to receive emails about that kind of stuff. It just creates a tense environment.
Most of the sites I know of don't even tell you when your content is removed. That always bugged me about AB. I remember one time ether you or I asked a silly trunk or basement question about the other and it vanished from the site. I wrote every moderator and Tu to find out what happened to it and nobody even bothered to respond to me. That kind of stuff ticked me off. If I'm making a mistake, at least tell me what it is I'm doing, so I don't do it again- don't just wordlessly delete stuff I've posted and then not tell me why. That's why we make a point of telling people when stuff does get removed or edited. It's not usually a discipline thing- it's out of respect for the posters and to avoid repeat issues. Unfortunately, not everyone receives it that way. With categories, if it matters to you, you can see where we moved it and probably surmise why we did. To create a notification process for each move would be unnecessarily time-consuming and detrimental to morale, in my opinion.
