Gollgagh said:
He did a deceptive thing by changing it to a sample. That's the part I take issue with.
It didn't need to happen, and I would consider it an abuse of your powers.
It's not deceptive, it's not abuse. Because of how the replacement system works, it's the only way to resolve the issue. You can't have two identical pictures in the database. The way around that is to replace the post with a lesser quality image and then, optionally, with the original sampled image.
The policy regarding image samples as documented many times over in the wiki and discussed and clarified in the forum is that since we have the ability to replace images, you should not manually upload an image and make the sampled image the parent, however that is what you did. And hence, your posts were deleted for being duplicates. You learned about the _raw files from the very same thread where this was explicitly stated, so who do you have to blame but yourself for not paying close attention?