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Underground > Policy & Help >

Invisible deletions and transparent deletions.

15:22 / 15.09.03

Money $hot, in the Conversation, wrote this:
Cos, while I really couldn't give a fiddler's fart about the issues or protagonists involved, and so perhaps should button it, I have to say that the way my posts (pretty much agreeing with the general sway of opinion on display here) are disappearing does have a creepy feeling about it.

I've thought of this before -- the creepiness of being disappeared, suddenly, with no trace.

On other boards I've seen (phBB ones), a deleted post is more like erased and replaced with [Deleted by Admins] or some similar line of text. That way, it's obvious someone deleted something that was posted by a particular person at a particular time. The user name is still there on the side along with the posting time.

Here, when a post is deleted, it's deleted. Gone. No trace. As a result, you can sometimes get something like this recent example from the Photos thread in the Conversation: theroadtorio posted a graffiti-ed modification of Cameron Stewart's photo, and the mods deleted it as potentially offensive (or whatever). Now, you've got Cameron saying "Actually, it's an improvement" in mid-air. Reading it now, you have no idea what he's talking about. The deletion is invisible.
On a phBB board, you'd have a note there, saying theroadtorio's post was deleted. The deletion would be transparent... the reader would know what's going on. It does create a bump in the reading experience, though, and in a contentious thread, a single pissed-off user could render the topic unreadable even if repeatedly deleted, just by virtue of deletion notices.

So I guess what I'm asking is how transparent do we want deletions to be? How invisible?

Tryphena Absent

15:34 / 15.09.03

I don't think the problem lies so much in lack of invisibility as in the lack of explanation. It's not always evident that something has been posted and I think the constant disappearance and locking of threads does make people feel like they're missing something. They're not let in to the big secret but also don't realise that there is no big secret. Of course it makes people feel grim because they have no control or information about their environment.

I find it creepy, I wish we had some kind of link to what's going on instead of everything just going away all the time.

16:07 / 15.09.03

Been wondering about this - before we moved over to the new software, the affected post would have a line in it saying "Last edited by: E. Randy Dupre at..." Distributed moderation means that a statement like this wouldn't be accurate, so how's about...

When you modify a post you have to include a reason. How's about the post in question stays in place in the thread, has whatever modifications are requested carried out and includes the moderation reason at the bottom of it? I can see problems with this suggestion - there's not a huge amount of point in having something say "Moderation reason: typo", for example, and it'd get pretty tiring reading "Moderation reason: Andrew Knowledge", but it might help reduce the feeling that things are happening out of the sight of the majority of the board.

16:30 / 15.09.03

We talked about this before, didn't we, in the "Laughable" thread.

It would be nice to have at least a trace of what was (in effect) deleted and I agree with Mr Dupre about giving a simple reason. It needn't be any more specific than "retracted/edited by poster" or "removed because of offensive language" or "abuse of free speech" and would not in itself entitle user disagreement with mod decisions.

I don't think anyone seriously believes there's a big secret, there's likely not. But in the absence of any other info about a disappearance, it's still a possibility -- some moderators have very "big" personalities -- and that's what's creepy.

18:01 / 15.09.03

It needn't be any more specific than "retracted/edited by poster" or "removed because of offensive language" or "abuse of free speech"

I'm not sure how workable this is. Would just "retracted/edited by poster" or "deleted/edited by mod" do?

We're The Great Old Ones Now

18:20 / 15.09.03

I suggested a while back that it might be possible to keep a log-page of moderator decisions. Tom's looking into it - presumably, that would also make it possible to link from where a post was to the process which led to its deletion, or to have a 'recent deletions' page you could check if you thought something was missing.

There is an advantage to not having a flag to removed posts, though - sometimes, posts are removed because they damage, sidetrack, or defame. Flag the deletion, and the problem isn't as thoroughly removed as it would be otherwise. The atmosphere and ethos of a topic may still be altered. On the other hand, if the vanishing is generating unease, maybe that's a necessary evil.

I can't help but feel this is a created issue, however - 6opow has made a lot of angry noises and this worry is maybe a consequence of that noise, rather than a genuine pre-existing concern. Or maybe not. But honestly, does anyone truly believe there's a Barbelith Thought Police out there?

If there is, I'm a little offended I wasn't asked to join - I thought I was the resident bastard.

[sigh]

(Handing over the Thought Police to wishywashy liberals like Haus and Fly... when I was a lad, we knew what electrodes and Coca Cola were for, not like now. Not a piece of rubber hose between you, you lot...)

18:34 / 15.09.03

"Now, you've got Cameron saying "Actually, it's an improvement" in mid-air. Reading it now, you have no idea what he's talking about. The deletion is invisible."

Yes, and this seems pretty underhanded, but it is likely no ones fault, but an oversight in the construction of the software, yes? This happened to me today (Haus' slandering of me has been removed without a trace, and now my post sits there senseless and without an anchor to continuity. In this particular case, it has gone a long way in helping me to feel v. upset about this whole affair. it is much like if I beat my wife and then she and I both conspire to hide the evidence. The abuse is still occurring, but the proof of the abuse vanishes into thin air.

On a different note, this seem like a form of dishonesty. In essence, when we remove a post or a thread or whatever, and leave no trace of its record, then we are deceiving the other members of the community. It is funny that mods came on board here partly so people could not do exactly this all by themselves, but now it seems it still happens, but on the whims and fancies of a select few.

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:49 / 15.09.03

(Removed because Nick has already stated this case between me starting and delivering this post. This is a moderate rather than a delete, but IIRC both require one vote, so perhaps doing something like this when a post has to be deleted for reasons other than trolling, for example the deletion of the link to scans of Flex Mentallo, which was removed for legal reasons, might work to keep up the structure of threads more successfully)

19:08 / 15.09.03

Deva: I would like to talk about why it would be unworkable -- what problems do you foresee?

Sam: Of course, you would have to delete the content of unlawful or offensive posts. What I have in mind is an empty space with some "deleted because of offensive language" text or whatever is appropriate.

I don't think it's a "created" problem any more than many other problems are created. For the record, I wholeheartedly support the removal of disruptive posts without user consultation, and I don't give a tinker's cuss about 6opow's histrionic complaint. It is just that it is spooky when things go missing without explanation. If I have no information on why something is broken, I cannot reject any reasonable possibility as to the cause. It is an unreasonable assumption that there is a Barbelith Thought Police. However, a quorum of three is quite small ...

I don't wish for mods to be "personally" responsible for their decisions or for them to have to argue the point after the fact. I see a short explanation appearing on screen (possibly generated automatically as part of the mod action) after a thread/post has been fundamentally changed in much the same way as I do the progress bar at the bottom of my browser: it doesn't prove much but it is nevertheless reassuring that the machine believes it is running properly.

19:20 / 15.09.03

I wonder -- on a wiki, there's a "Recent Changes" page that seems to function like a bulletin board, sort of, showing what has changed anywhere in that wiki over the past however many days.

There are also two levels of disclosure -- "Recent Changes (Major Edits)" and "Recent Changes (Minor Edits)". Major Edits gives you an overview -- the easy version of what's been going on. The Minor Edits page gives you everything that has happened over the same time period. It's pretty dense, but if you want to see every change on the site, that's the view to choose.

I wonder if it'd be possible to create a marked and an unmarked view for the messageboard -- an invisible Barbelith and a transparent Barbelith.

19:21 / 15.09.03

I can certainly see the problem, and I think it's partly arisen (as with so much else, in terms of moderation structure) as a result of Tom's 'not a member of Barbelith' decision in the wake of the Andrew's persistently troublesome behaviour. Moderators are supposed to be deleting anything posted by Andrew with minimum fuss - but there's usually a 'lag period' with every new Knodgesuit, before Andrew becomes openly abusive. During this period, people quite reasonably engage with and respond to his posting - so when Andrew's individual posts are deleted, the thread frequently makes little sense.

Given the above, one solution might be for Mods to avoid outright deletion of any post but instead use Modify Post to leave a message?

19:26 / 15.09.03

Now that I think of it, the mod-decision page Sam Vega suggests would work just about as well -- if you wanted to check on the status of an edit, you could.

20:28 / 15.09.03

Deva: I would like to talk about why it would be unworkable -- what problems do you foresee?

Sorry, Ignatius - was posting in a hurry because, embarrassingly, I wanted to watch a documentary about a second world war illusionist on Channel 4. Basically, I do think that marking deleted posts is a good idea, even (or especially) in relatively innocent examples, just to make threads easier to follow, and I think that a poster should be able to add a reason to a self-deleted post, as in Haus's post above. But where a mod deletes a post or thread, we have, as I see it, three options:

(1) The current system, where the post/thread is eerily "disappeared"
(2) A system where the post is deleted and only a message like "Deleted by mod" appears
(3) The one you suggest (message saying "deleted - offensive language").

I'm in favour of (2) over (3) because... um. Rambly thoughts follow. Deciding to delete is sort of like a message to the poster concerned that nothing ze can say will justify the post's continued existence on the board. With that in mind, I think tagging "offensive language" or "abuse of free speech" is likely to lead to millions of meta-threads on what exactly was offensive, what exactly constitutes an abuse of free speech, etc: it's like saying "If you can defend your original post against this charge, it will be allowed to stand". Which is just going to drag the whole thing out longer: deletion is a last resort already.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

20:35 / 15.09.03

Is it perhaps, for now, a good idea for mods who want to delete posts to actually modify the text to '[post deleted by moderator]'

20:42 / 15.09.03

The problem with all these conversations is that I'm not necessarily able to put them all into effect. Cal has a lot of other things to do, and many of these changes are out of my expertise. Two comments I might make at this point might be that every change is being stored and that we'll see what can be done later...

22:40 / 15.09.03

and many of these changes are out of my expertise.

...goodness me.