Yes.
The forum is in a group of forums headed Flight Deck Forums. It is broadly targeted at professional airline pilots. Reporting Points that may affect our jobs or lives as professional pilots. Also, items that may be of interest to professional pilots. That doesn't preclude contribution from anybody outside of this target group, but neither should that contribution overshadow the target group.
Commercial airline accidents and serious incidents always attract a great deal of general interest, and given the target demographic, PPRuNe is one of the global primary websites for discussion when a "headline" aviation event such as this occurs. Whilst moderation tends to be light generally, major events nearly always result in significant levels of pruning in order to keep the forum traffic broadly on topic and relevant to the primary audience.
New sign-ups are always welcome, and questions, contribution and debate from non-professional pilots are also welcome. However there are significant volumes of traffic from people who simply sign-up or post in order to express their condolences, venture their own personal theories, or ask questions that fall outside of the remit (and often interest) of the primary forum target group. In addition, many contributors simply repeat or re-hash a question or topic that has been covered in some depth in previous posts.
Although it is a far from perfect form of surgery, the volume of contributions needs to be triaged and managed in order to keep the forum topic focused. This often results in scything whole sections of posts to keep the thread from becoming a completely unmanageable mess. Unfortunately that often means that posts that might otherwise be left in-situ, also fall casualty to the periodic sweeps.
The interest in this particular thread has at times raised the volume of minute-to-minute traffic fiftyfold! There have been anything up to 18,000 people viewing the thread at any one time, and at no point in the last three weeks has the volume of thread traffic fallen below ten times the regular flow. A handful of moderators have worked around the clock to keep the thread in a semblance of manageable order. Topics have sometimes been given specific windows of priority, and an attempt has been made to give every viewpoint a fair airing. Whatever moderation that is applied, it is always going to upset somebody, but that is simply the way it is, in order to attempt to achieve the normal site objectives.
At the time of writing this reply, there are nearly 9000 posts that have had nearly fourteen million views! There are (and I haven't counted them) probably nearly as many posts that have been deleted. They have all been read, and for the reasons given, those that have been deleted have been done so to provide some basic sense of order and readability to the thread.
A great many hours have gone into the moderation task on this one thread. Anybody who believes that the moderators are going to write a personal explanation in response to each of the many thousands of deleted posts, is simply deluding themselves. There simply isn't the time or resource, and even if that were not the case, such explanations are more often than not simply a seed for further protest and argument. When that protest and argument manifests itself in the main thread body, or a poster simply refuses to accept the post deletion, thereby adding to the exceptional moderation workload, they may be deprived of the opportunity to further contribute for a period of time. That should not stop them from being able to read the thread.