I am not sure why Ed will not allow retractions. Perhaps from a legal standpoint, I know that having devloped Fraudbug, if a site moderator determines what is or is not posted, then the site owner/moderator can be held legally liable for the content and its damage, much like a news paper. If the content is published by a 3rd party or consumer in this case, that party is liable. This creates a non-liable state for ripoffreport, it would be like trying to sue the inventor of the printing press for damage from a story from a news paper printed on it. Perhaps this was Ed's reasoning. As soon as you allow retractions, the system could turn into a "racket" where people/copnsumers could game the system and post, then remove complaints for compensation. This is why Fraudbug does not allow retraction.
I agree however though that people do post things in anger, and may need to remove content either for safety reasons legal or other. This is why fraudbug.com has an "update Complaint" function, to allow a consumer to state retraction of a previous statement. It will not remove the original complaint however nor will it be removed from Google.
People do a lot of things out of spite or anger without fully considering the long term implications. Either way, Google will not deindex the information even if you could retract the complaint, which is usually what the business are most upset about, the story may still show up on Google for years depending on its crawl rate and casch. So even retraction is somewhat moot. The main difference between Fraudbug and Ripoff Report is that fraudbug pays back a selected charity with the advertising revenue made from a complaint. We advise that the consumers work out thir situation with the business, generally businesses end up on ripoffreport, Yelp and Fraudbug because they have not adequately handeled their customer relations.