So what Jackson told you - but didn't tell the community at large - is that their bad business decisions and their greed have screwed the pooch.  

SA was fully ad-supported for over a decade.  They paid their own salaries and they paid the authors.  They drew enough eyeballs to support this.

But now they aren't meeting their cash flow needs.  The Marketplace subscriptions have hit saturation.  Their content was never - NEVER - good enough to justify charging for, but yes they got a few saps to pay for it. That base has been fully exploited. 

The remaining free authors have been whining that their pay was cut way back.  So the free content will pretty much die.  And finally they're driving away the remaining eyeballs, which will drive down the ad revenue below the present level which already "can't support the business".

They are doomed no matter what they do.  SA cannot be saved.  Plain and simple, they got greedy and now they will go the way of sites like Motley Fool.

Have they cut their own salaries or laid off any employees? We'll never know until the day when the site simply quits working.  Which I unfortunately expect Any Day Now.

David Jackson, I challenge you to reply.  

I know from personal experience that the only way to get a response from SA staff is to make very aggressive and hostile personal comments, insult their integrity, etc.  They don't care that anyone is "unhappy", and they surely don't want our suggestions.

This is the first time I've posted anywhere on SA in over three years.  I got so tired with the amateurish moderation of the comment threads, it was no longer worth my time to participate.  Now I can't read free articles either?  

I'm guessing that Eli Hoffmann was the lone voice opposing this ridiculous change to SA's business model.  Now that he's gone, you can proceed down the death spiral.

OK Daniel, it has happened again.  Here is a screen shot.  This is on the current Firefox.  The history wraps back to the beginning after 32 comments.  I have blanked out all identifying information.

You're kidding, right?  They have always had the ability to report comments, and they give the reporter a list of reasons for reporting (obscenities, etc.).

But the problem is that the reporter is always assumed to be correct, and the comment is always deleted.  No investigation is ever done.  This leads to petty people with too much time on their hands reporting things willy-nilly and trashing discussions.  I've had days where I've gotten tens of emails from SA telling me that various comments have been deleted for trumped-up reasons - comments that are often months or years old.  The reporters know that when a certain number of comments get reported, you get put on various disciplinary statuses like "moderator's approval required" or "suspended".  Or if you protest to SA management, you also get suspended.

This forum only responds to technical questions.  Anything else is ignored.  I've also tried to get their attention about stalkers and the horrible way things are moderated, and there is never any response.  The people responsible for moderation and discipline (if there are any - sometimes I wonder if it's all automated in a really bad way) are not reading this forum.  So don't bother complaining; it won't accomplish anything.

I have seen this on my own profile, and on profiles of others.  

I believe I've seen it in multiple browsers.

I saw it just yesterday (using Firefox) but today it seems to be OK.  It happens almost at random.  So I understand that it may be hard to debug if you can't force it to happen.

Daniel, I have posted screen shots several times.  You should be able to find a thread here where I did that about once a week for a month or two, trying to convince you that this was a real problem.  You never replied.  Look it up.

You should be able to review your own comment history or that of another user.  There is a longstanding bug, however, that causes only the first 50-ish comments to be displayed and then it loops back to the start again.  Deleting cookies sometimes helps.  SA has taken no action on this bug in almost 2 years.

"Starting with page 3, the list is not there."

And your failure to properly disclose or announce this, speaks to your ethics.  We're just the tip of a huge wave of disappointment and disgust.