11
votes
Have "whispers" been implemented?
I'm really curious if they have, because on this thread, there's a bunch of comments from "unknown user." If whispers have been implemented, how do I use them? I can't seem to find any information about them.
No. Those are comments from a user that asked me to delete their account but leave their comments behind, disassociated from their username. This isn't the first time I've done this, but the other times were generally for users that hadn't been active in a while, so it wasn't as noticeable.
I think you might be confusing a couple of things as well - in general, "whispers" or "asides" has referred to the ability to basically label your own comments as Noise so that they're collapsed by default and don't bump the thread, but they'd still be under your username. This would be more similar to anonymous posting.
I think... maybe "unknown user" is a bit of a confusing message. Perhaps "removed" or something something similar? Honestly, "unknown user" almost reads as a bug; it's strange to see a service refer to one of its users as "unknown" outside of an authentication error. (Also this might never come up again in such a noticeable way so... maybe not even worth the effort of responding to this comment)
Yeah, I can see that. It's correct though - I literally have no record any more of who made the post any more, it was made by an unknown user. There may be a better way to word/indicate it, but I'm not sure. A lot of the other possibilities (like "removed") have other implications too that are misleading in different ways.
"account deleted"
It's really not intended to be cute, and I think you're looking at this individual case too specifically. Sure, for now you probably know who it was. Years from now, if there are hundreds of users who have all disassociated their comments, will you still know which one of those users wrote any given comments? I'm pretty sure that I won't remember, and from a data perspective there's no distinction. All of them just have their "author" data set to something that means "unknown".
Even @AugustusFerdinand's suggestion of "account deleted" or "deleted user" isn't really correct. There's already been a user that asked me to disassociate their comments while I was deleting their account, then later asked for me to un-delete their account. I did, but there was no way to re-associate their posts. So there are already some "unknown user" posts out there that weren't made by a deleted account, and it's basically impossible to know which ones they were.
The only accurate description is saying that we don't know which user made the posts. "Unknown user" might not be the best way to word it and I agree that it can be interpreted as more of an error, but anything accurate is going to be along the same lines.
That seems like an edge case and as you've stated years from now when there are hundreds of users that have disassociated or deleted their accounts, I'd be willing to guess the number that have requested to be un-deleted (let alone the number of requests for such you'd fulfill as I assume it's not a normal task) will still be very small.
But "unknown" is still accurate and fits both cases while "deleted" only fits one of em. We got a good thing going here, let's not mess with it.
Unknown is accurate, but not apparent and will lead to the inevitable posts and comments about what does it mean.
Isn't deleted still accurate? That account was deleted, it isn't anymore, but it was.
edit: nvm
You can tear the comments off an account without deleting the account.
Ah, my bad. I thought whispers were more like a throwaway that you could use - but wouldn't be linked to you (outside of admins).
Thanks for clearing it up!
So that's what that does...
Does anyone remember "Anonymous Coward" from Slashdot? What if we created a Tildes-specific term that could be a part of the culture here? There's nothing inherently wrong or whatnot about "unknown user" or "account deleted", but why not take the chance to forge our own path?
May I suggest this instead:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯