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Underground > Policy & Help >

Spring Cleaning

15:55 / 02.04.04

In the Gathering, there's a ton of threads that could be deleted with a clear conscience. These would include threads that are basically a one-post advert for past events and the like. Some threads did become conversations or discussions and contain some material that makes amusing reading, but the majority are just taking up space.

Is there any objection to a clearing out of The Gathering, keeping anything younger than one month? Threads that contain witty reparte, or are of historic significance would be kept (possibly with a modified summary indicating why...it'll be like putting up museum tags).

Our Lady Has Left the Building

09:14 / 03.04.04

Makes sense to me. I wonder whether we should start tidying up the Conversation at some point. I know Tom says that the threads don't take up much space but that much does have to mount up at some point...

10:02 / 03.04.04

Seems like a reasonable idea, although I think there's scope for controversy. I mean, people like to have a record of these sorts of things for any number of reasons; and unless a very conservative approach is taken, I predict upset.
Of course there are going to be the no-brainers: threads with no replies which no one will miss on the one hand, and threads that are valuable accounts of certain events on the other. But then there's this dreadful grey area. I also think that from a community point of view, Gathering threads can be quite interesting, and often contain useful information and links for various places and events. With the google making the place so much more searchable, I'd have thought that more of the old threads will see the light of IE again.
Then again, that might be another reason to kill some of them off...

Basically I'm a bit ambivalent about it. If bandwidth can be reclaimed, then I think there's a good argument for cutting out the dead wood, but I'm also concerned that it might not be that simple to decide what goes and what stays. At the moment I'm happy to vote for really ancient threads, with no replies, to be deleted (they can be reinstated if someone notices and objects to the loss of a particular topic, right?). But I reckon we should err on the side of caution and agree some unambiguous criteria here if there's a will to go much further than that.

11:23 / 03.04.04

Of course this is going to raise some thorny issues. And while I do realise that there's a load of threads in the Gathering that are valuable sources of info and entertainment (the really old thread where a BarbeMeet and a furry conference coincided in the same venue had me in stiches), there's a lot of them that are basically short conversations about one venue/event that lead to nothing that I would keep.

My suggestion to any Gathering moderator who recieves a deletion request for a thread that they wish to keep is to reject it, then modify the summary to indicate the reasons why this thread has been kept.

12:52 / 03.04.04

if everyone agrees that it's good policy to keep things tidy, I'd be willing to go with deleting the one, two post threads.

I have to admit I was a little alarmed when my first call for moderation included "you have 211 jobs to do", and it was nearly all deletions!

13:11 / 03.04.04

Maybe some moderators or posters with CD burners could volunteer to do some archiving, maybe mail the CD archives to Tom for safe-keeping. Good idea, bad idea, neutral but pointless idea?

18:15 / 03.04.04

I have to say that I'm not totally thrilled by some of the things that people have put up for deletion. There's some nice stuff in there, and realistically we can't go and add summaries to every thread we find as we find it (particularly given there's a good hundred and fifty left. Can I ask people to make sure they're actually looking at the thing, and if there's pretty much any reasonable conversation at all - or if it's about a specific lither going abroad and writing a bit about what they're planning to do, can we NOT delete - these are the ones that people go back to later and say, "I wonder what kind of frame of mind I was in before I ... and then poof they accidentally find it via google and feel cheerier about it"

With regards to bandwidth and diskspace and the like - basically nothing is ever EVER deleted from the database for legal reasons, so deleting a thread doesn't save any space at all. Bandwidth is another thing - these things are google-worthy and hence may get traffic, but we're not really using the bandwidth I got for us yet, so taht's not an issue. Basically we're only deleting things to make it easier to find the good stuff, and as such we should be more careful that we don't accidentally delete any of that good stuff in the process.