Deleted_user Locked

I’m getting rather confused with what’s going on in this forum. First I noticed a few days ago that ‘Mod’ was appearing against EO’s name. I tried to find links to indicate when/how this moderating activity had started and what its rules are, but in vain. However, this was later clarified to some degree by the Lars Rehm thread.

EO was also the top poster in the forum, but suddenly he has disappeared from the list and the top poster now is: DELETED_USER with 12,851 posts to his name!! I must be suffering from major memory loss because I don’t recall seeing a single post from this guy before.

So what is going on? Is deleted_user EO? Or are they not deleting posts by users who are later blocked, but just renaming the poster as deleted_user? It would be nice for avoidance of confusion if DPR would explain what changes are scheduled before they do things to the forums.