True, but the thing is, removing everything critical of your company from your forum, when you have an economic interest in keeping a good image, just reeks of dishonesty. And I just bet that nowhere in the forum rules will you find the words "if you criticize our company, your posts will be deleted".

I would say the current situation with AC2 is actually worse than that. The people complaining are not in fact complaining about Valve or the Steam service, the reasonable complaints are being leveled at Ubisoft and AC2 specifically. Even reviews by Gamespot and Eurogamer are now marking this game down based solely on the DRM and the experience they have had trying to play the game (8/10 and 5/10 respectively). Valve forum moderators covering this up are only causing their own customers excessive grief.
GFWL has been covered before in great detail. If you don't want to use it you do not have to. It is extremely un-invasive DRM. The only time it is required is to play multiplayer which runs on... yes the LIVE servers so its the same as any other MP game, you need to use a profile. An exception is GTA 4 but I already listed that. Limited SecuROM activations, GFWL and Rockstars own Social Club rubbish was one too many hoops to jump through for a great many players.

I would also bet there is some kind of rule in there that says something to the effect of "we reserve the right to lock, edit and/or delete any post or topic that we deem inappropriate". Why that particular criticism of Ubi would be deemed inappropriate, I don't know, but it does seem dishonest to do that.
Just so we are clear before this starts an argument, I am in no way defending what the mods on the Steam forums did, I just find it annoying when people scream about free speech on forums when there is no such thing as free speech on forums or pretty much any online outlet. There are always rules set on what you can or cannot say on the internet, set by the website in question, or your ISP, maybe even your government (depending on where you live). The only difference from site to site is the level of restrictions applied.

I doubt anyone thought you were. Valve and indeed any website owners have the right to ban people for bashing their service some are liberal in that right and some like Valve can be heavy handed at times. Nevertheless they do have that right as all users accepted their T&C's before they signed up to their forums.
Why Valve are are using that right to silence people who are complaining about a product that is not even theirs is known only to Valve.

because your 50 dollars <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< the deal with ubisoft

Or 50 Euros, if you are unfortunate enough to live in Europe.

My thoughts exactly ...

Many topics tend to devolve into flame wars, something which is generally not seen as a good thing. I assume moderators strive to keep the number of topics about the same issue down as much as possible to make it easier to discuss something (I've seen forums where they've redirected people to 500+ page threads... ugh) while at the same time getting rid of non-constructive crud.
Of course, I don't really have a lot of experience with the Valve forums, but from what I've seen on many other sites most moderated topics do break forum rules in one way or another - usually by unnecessary mud-flinging or plain flaming. I honestly doubt they're "out to get you", so to speak. Absolute censorship isn't really possible on the intartubes.

Pretty much. While the Steam forums do seem to be much stricter than a lot of other forums, it all boils down to making sure that actual discussion can happen. Contrary to popular belief, threads consisting of nothing but bashing (often by people who proudly state they aren't customers) isn't good for a forum. Even GoG deleted Anjohl's whine-fest from a few days back.
But when people are just discussing stuff, they really do bash the crap out of Steam sometimes. It is just a matter of the nature of it, really. You don't have to worship Gabe Newell to post there, you just need to be somewhat civil, and keep in mind that this is a forum full of Counterstrike and TF2 players. The mods are sick and tired of flamewars and bashfests :p
I mean, as funny as the car thing was, what did it really contribute? It was just another opportunity for the pro-Ubi people to war with the anti-DRM people.

I agree with you, there are way too many flames over there. However its the selective editing and deleting that has people crying foul. If they want to give the impression of fairness then at the very least the Valve moderators themselves should not be posting in the pro-DRM threads.
Stay neutral and shut up. Get involved with one side and the other side true or not will have mud to sling at you.

Agreed on that one, but keep in mind that there is also the danger of "Those mods are just high in their castles and don't know what is going on". You can build a community by having the mods interact. There are dangers to that (pre-Buggo Relic), but there are also times that it leads to very fun discussions and senses that "if this was deleted, there was a reason" (Buggo Relic :p). Then you run into the problem of overly strict mods (post-Buggo Relic :p) who pretty much won't allow discussions.

Thing is Buggo and the later mods like Haven0 were/are employed by Relic. They were able to talk for their company. If this was an Ubisoft mod in an Ubisoft forum people would understand. It's not its the Steam forums and Steam moderators are giving their opinions not Ubisoft facts. Thats where the problem lies.

Ubisoft have finally commented:
Mr_Shade UK Forum Manager:
"re: server problems: 'We’re preparing something to compensate our affected customers. More details to come soon.'"
This should be interesting. $1 off any purchase from the Ubisoft store?

A free month of service when, this time next year, support for their "old" games turns into a paid service.
I've only just thought of that but its disturbingly plausible. A year after the game is released, the server is turned off except for subscribers...