Sorry for seeming to have secrecy or malicious intent. That is unfortunately far from the truth.
To answer your original question--we CAN bring up legitimate needs in this forum. This community was made to help share information, stories, knowledge, camaraderie, and support. As such, we encourage ideas like this to come from our members! When a discussion like you mention (the CGM repeater concept, for example) is removed, we contact the OP to let them know about the necessary information that is needed before something like that can be approved for posting.
As Karen (above) mentions, within the Terms of Service there is some guidance on posting a survey--in this case it was not an "official survey" with a URL link through survey monkey or some other hosting software, but rather an informal inquiry. Unfortunately when mentioning that it is for a class or some other institutional purpose, it brings HIPAA into the loop.
As Brian (above) mentions, we (as a community) have a reasonable expectation to privacy. When folks (knowingly or unknowingly) come into the community and offer to take our information without a formal consent, then that is a potential violation of HIPAA. The terms of service were set up in such a manner to try and still allow these types of postings that you mention (the CGM repeater concept, for example), but within the safety of adhering to the rules.
We would encourage this type of posting, actually. But these types of posts must go through the necessary steps to ensure that they are free and clear from violating something as serious as HIPAA (there are very hefty fines for HIPAA violations, and one instance like this can be applied to every individual who may reply...there is a range from $100 to $50,000 per violation fine gets out of hand very quickly, as you can imagine).
And yes, our forums operate slightly different than other sites. Posting to a group limits the initial "view" of that discussion to that particular group. However, accessing the forums page will show all of the discussions from all of the groups, regardless of whether you are a member of that group or not. So if you post in a group, and then post in a general area (such as the General Diabetes Topics, like you have done here), both discussions show up on that previously-linked forums page. This can cause confusion because someone may reply to one but not the other, and valuable dialogue can be lost. As such, when something is posted more than once, it is typically the policy to remove one of the postings to try and prevent that confusion for the OP as well as the general membership of the community.
I hope that helps to clarify some of the questions that have arisen from the removal of the CGM repeater discussion. And I also hope that the OP of that discussion will take the necessary steps to be able to post again, because I thought it was a great idea/post as well, and is worthy of discussion.