I agree it's a dilemma. I myself pondered on deleting my own account. But I decided to clean it instead, leaving any community content. I too think it's a loss if the contents are just gone like...
I agree it's a dilemma. I myself pondered on deleting my own account. But I decided to clean it instead, leaving any community content. I too think it's a loss if the contents are just gone like smoke. But there is no way we can know all reasons why someone wants to delete their content, and this wish should always be honoured.
I think maybe a compromise is to allow users to give away topics for adoption, or just leave from a deleted user. But this should "always* be with consent. I've had users, on Tildes too, create scenarios over the weirdest stuff where I'm uncertain if I am ok with leaving stuff up. If deletion is not an option, I am certainly unwilling to do community stuff that often can attract some negative attention among the positive.
We've talked about it a little in the past, but I'd definitely like to have a sort of "disown" functionality where people can choose to leave the content of a topic/comment up, but disassociate...
We've talked about it a little in the past, but I'd definitely like to have a sort of "disown" functionality where people can choose to leave the content of a topic/comment up, but disassociate their name from it. I think this should always be the user's choice though, not something that's forced on them just because a post reaches a certain threshold of popularity.
In terms of other sites that do a similar thing, the most prominent is probably StackOverflow and the other StackExchange sites, where they have this concept of "community wiki" posts that are kind of "collectively owned".
Maybe this is a concept that would be more appropriate to be handled by an actual wiki though, instead of trying to find a way to make it work with posts.
Oh, I didn't really explain what I meant. I probably wouldn't want some way of relocating deleted posts onto the wiki or anything like that, I'm just thinking that if we had a wiki, it would be...
Oh, I didn't really explain what I meant. I probably wouldn't want some way of relocating deleted posts onto the wiki or anything like that, I'm just thinking that if we had a wiki, it would be easy to take things like the survey posts and recognize, "hey, this is more of a resource, can we keep it on the wiki instead of just leaving it as a post?"
One problem could be that any info mentioned in that post that the user wanted to get rid of (personal info of any level/vagueness) might be preserved that way. On the contrary, the link to their...
One problem could be that any info mentioned in that post that the user wanted to get rid of (personal info of any level/vagueness) might be preserved that way. On the contrary, the link to their name would be gone and none would know it was their post.
Deletion has a reason(unless it's a site-wide wipe as I understand happened before).
Remove all traces of the person themselves but leave the link and it's comments in place? Or offer a soft-delete function that just wipes your name off of a post which maybe flashes a notification with "make sure to remove all possibly identifying info from your post"?
Or, "adopting" a post: posts left behind by the softdelete can be adopted by active moderators/admins which makes them able to change the contents of that post if updates are required.
I'm no technical bird so I don't know if this is easily/securely possible in technical terms, though.
Who decides that a post is "historical" and needs to saved from deletion? The author, who wants to delete the post ? Deimos? A community vote? If it's not the author who decides that their post is...
Who decides that a post is "historical" and needs to saved from deletion? The author, who wants to delete the post ? Deimos? A community vote?
If it's not the author who decides that their post is "historical", then you're effectively creating a mechanic whereby someone else can take your post away from you, and remove it from your control. That seems somewhat problematic.
The right thing to do is to allow authors to nominate their own post as "historical" - except that an author who wants to delete the post isn't going to do this, so the post will be lost anyway.
If a valuable and heated internet discussion is rising and I feel like preserving it I use the internet archive, in addition to bookmarks. Then I can check archive later if there are deleted...
If a valuable and heated internet discussion is rising and I feel like preserving it I use the internet archive, in addition to bookmarks. Then I can check archive later if there are deleted comments. As Tildes is going to go public, that will work.
I agree it's a dilemma. I myself pondered on deleting my own account. But I decided to clean it instead, leaving any community content. I too think it's a loss if the contents are just gone like smoke. But there is no way we can know all reasons why someone wants to delete their content, and this wish should always be honoured.
I think maybe a compromise is to allow users to give away topics for adoption, or just leave from a deleted user. But this should "always* be with consent. I've had users, on Tildes too, create scenarios over the weirdest stuff where I'm uncertain if I am ok with leaving stuff up. If deletion is not an option, I am certainly unwilling to do community stuff that often can attract some negative attention among the positive.
We've talked about it a little in the past, but I'd definitely like to have a sort of "disown" functionality where people can choose to leave the content of a topic/comment up, but disassociate their name from it. I think this should always be the user's choice though, not something that's forced on them just because a post reaches a certain threshold of popularity.
In terms of other sites that do a similar thing, the most prominent is probably StackOverflow and the other StackExchange sites, where they have this concept of "community wiki" posts that are kind of "collectively owned".
Maybe this is a concept that would be more appropriate to be handled by an actual wiki though, instead of trying to find a way to make it work with posts.
Oh, I didn't really explain what I meant. I probably wouldn't want some way of relocating deleted posts onto the wiki or anything like that, I'm just thinking that if we had a wiki, it would be easy to take things like the survey posts and recognize, "hey, this is more of a resource, can we keep it on the wiki instead of just leaving it as a post?"
One problem could be that any info mentioned in that post that the user wanted to get rid of (personal info of any level/vagueness) might be preserved that way. On the contrary, the link to their name would be gone and none would know it was their post.
Deletion has a reason(unless it's a site-wide wipe as I understand happened before).
Remove all traces of the person themselves but leave the link and it's comments in place? Or offer a soft-delete function that just wipes your name off of a post which maybe flashes a notification with "make sure to remove all possibly identifying info from your post"?
Or, "adopting" a post: posts left behind by the softdelete can be adopted by active moderators/admins which makes them able to change the contents of that post if updates are required.
I'm no technical bird so I don't know if this is easily/securely possible in technical terms, though.
Who decides that a post is "historical" and needs to saved from deletion? The author, who wants to delete the post ? Deimos? A community vote?
If it's not the author who decides that their post is "historical", then you're effectively creating a mechanic whereby someone else can take your post away from you, and remove it from your control. That seems somewhat problematic.
The right thing to do is to allow authors to nominate their own post as "historical" - except that an author who wants to delete the post isn't going to do this, so the post will be lost anyway.
If a valuable and heated internet discussion is rising and I feel like preserving it I use the internet archive, in addition to bookmarks. Then I can check archive later if there are deleted comments. As Tildes is going to go public, that will work.