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Underground > Policy & Help >

Ancient personal post deletion

22:36 / 12.02.06

A recent deletion request has created some debate about the protocol for deleting ancient threads because the initial thread poster no longer feels comfortable with the discussion they created. This mainly happens in Conversation, and generally those threads are fairly personal.

I totally understand the reasoning for deletion requests such as these, but I also think that there are bigger issues at play here.

One of threads I might delete if I was inclined toward removing difficult personal posts is the thread about my father dying, which I posted in Conversation in 2003. In the main part it is symathy and condolence in reply to my initial post, and really specidfic to me and my situation. Arguably, an acceptable candidate for a deletion request from me.

However, recently I had a PM from someone who has hardly ever posted on the board which talked about having read that thread after a death in the family prompted a search on Barbelith.

My personal thread helped that poster, years after it had become a dark reminder for me.

So this whole thing has made me think about when it's appropriate to delete 'personal' threads, and at what level Barbelith (as a board) has 'control' over what remains posted here.

In the moderation requests thread I have written this: The real problem here is that once you've been here long enough you'll almost definitely start to hold different opinions or be in different circumstances in your life than you did or were when first posting.

I am not sure whether a poster has the 'right' (and I use that word loosely) to 'edit' the board to suit their current world-view or circumstance, and I think that by signing up to and posting on a message board you almost 'have' to accept that what you say will be recorded in the annals of the site, whether you feel that way in a few years time or not.

Tryphena Absent

23:09 / 12.02.06

For me it depends on the nature of the thread, where it was posted, when it was put there and the response to it.

If the thread is intensely personal, the responses are all directly related to it but are mainly a bolster or criticism of the original post and aren't necessarily consequential in any other way than I have no problem with deleting it. If it's a current thread then I'll talk to other moderators about it.

I'm not really bothered about whether it helps people or not. In the conversation than a new thread can be started on the same subject and that's not a problem.

Likewise I don't mind people editing out personal information if it doesn't effect the rest of the thread in other fora that I moderate. This is especially true if I would agree that request as soon as it was posted. I think it's important to have sympathy and respect for how much people want to reveal of their lives off board and that we should treat people as we would in reality- keeping their secrets and respecting their personal feelings.

23:40 / 12.02.06

That's true.

But is it not also true that when you post personal feelings or emotions you are, in a way, offering them up for permanent scrutiny?

I can see that personal feelings might change, and that a poster should have the right to withdraw those feelings if it doesn't affect the flow of a thread, or even the deletion of a whole thread if soley based on an original personal issue post.

But where does it stop? At what point, and how, and WHO distinguishes or can distinguish between 'Root Pruning' for an individual comfort zone and the board retaining relevance as a reference for people dealing with wide and varied issues?

I wonder, if we really looked at it, how many long-standing posters request deletion of ancient posts on the grounds that their personal circumstances had changed and the orginal post or thread was now irrelevant, or made them feel uncomfortable?

I think the discussion is about the following:

1/ That we accept that a minority of posters do this on a regular basis and we continue to allow them to edit the achive.

2/ That no poster can edit the archive after a certain cut off point, decided by the board.

3/ That all posters can edit the archive, whenever they choose.

4/ That some exception is given to posters who have valid reasons for editing.

So. If 4/ then how do we decide what is and isn't relevant, and should this just be a decision made by moderators, which it currently is?

I think a big issue is that for a poster to make a new post to an old thread stating that they no longer feel this way, only results in the thread being 'bumped' back up to the top which is the very last thing that they want to do with something they no longer believe or feel the same way about.

10:14 / 13.02.06

There's no need to ever bump a thread in order to say that you've changd your mind. If somebody else bumps it up, then yeah, but otherwise I don't see why it couldn't just be left alone.

An old Music thread that I started a few years ago was resurrected recently. I no longer particularly agree with the opinion I expressed in it originally, but I couldn't see much point in posting to it purely to make that point.

As far as the posting of personal information goes, the line should be fairly obvious - don't post anything now without considering first whether or not you're likely to be unhappy with its existence at some unspecified point in the future. It's not a particularly difficult one to work out.

That we accept that a minority of posters do this on a regular basis and we continue to allow them to edit the achive.

Absolutely not. Who decides which memnbers this applies to? Also, surely people doing this on a regular basis are misusing the board in a fundamental way, far more so than those who see one old comment that they'd sooner not have made?

It's got to be solution 4, really, and that's more or less the system that we're operating now. It should be on a case-by-case basis, with delete requests on old posts only being actioned once that post - and its place in the thread - has been checked over by whichever moderators receive the request. It should also only be agreed when that post has some potential, off-Barbelith consequences for the poster. Otehrwise the entire archive becomes unreadable.

10:33 / 13.02.06

The deletion requests that (I assume) inspired this thread are tricky, I think. Without revealing too much, they relate to post of a personal nature from an old poster well-loved by the community. My gut instinct is to agree the request, but a couple of things are currently giving me pause.
(1) One of the posts under consideration is the opening post in a thread which contains much useful, considered, expert advice. Without it, the rest of the thread is going to suffer from the loss of context on a subject where context is pretty important.
(2) The poster hasn’t given a reason for the deletion beyond the fact that ze no longer wants it on the board. As far as I know it doesn’t pose any particular threat to hir off-Barbelith (or on-Barbelith for that matter) and I worry about setting a precedent for posters removing key content that they just feel awkward, regretful or embarrassed about.

But like I say, I feel like a bit of a wanker for vacillating.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:45 / 13.02.06

I'll go with box number 4 as well. I've agreed the request, for the reasons I gave in the requests thread last night, but if others don't feel the same, fair enough. I would ask, though, that if you're going to disagree, it might be nice to PM the poster in question either explaining your reasons or just pointing to this thread and the discussion in the other one.

Proviso- I do feel I may be making an exception in this case purely because it's a poster I have a lot of time for (it'd be nice if they actually still posted, of course, but...)- so I am quite prepared to be outvoted on this one.

11:08 / 13.02.06

So, that request has gone through. Fair enough.

But, for the record, I disagreed the proposal to now delete the whole thread on the grounds that it now makes no sense. Firstly, because I think that reason is the reason for *not* agreeing the original delete, not a reason for enlarging it. And, anyway, we don't delete Convo threads just because they make little sense, do we?

Tryphena Absent

11:57 / 13.02.06

I'm sorry, I don't understand why this thread needs to be preserved. Why don't you try to answer that without referring to the slippery slope argument, which frankly is logically flawed anyway.

12:07 / 13.02.06

If you really don’t want an old thread of yours to ever be revived, couldn’t you just request for it to be locked? If you can tweak the content of your old posts, and move to ensure that yr old threads never return to the front page/become ‘current’ again, then why the need to obliterate an old thread?

Randy’s just pretty much said it, but here’s something from the should barbelith be an archive thread:

(1) if the person concerned has exposed personal information that they no longer wish to be in the public sphere, then they should be encouraged to edit the post concerned to remove that information and to explain why they're doing it in the reason field, (2) otherwise all efforts should be made to keep the thread as intact as possible, with people being required to stand by or apologise for positions that they may have articulated but are now ashamed of, rather than simply expecting to be able to delete it.

...seriously, what’s wrong with that? Personal information can be removed, with reason, but the moderators should be trying to keep the thread as intact as possible.

Also, on the thread-deletion thing: deleting an old thread will only really have the same effect as locking an old thread, won’t it? Don’t deleted threads still come up on google? They’re still there. And if that’s the case, then whether or not something is still accessible from page 146 of Convo seems pretty irrelevant.

12:38 / 13.02.06

I'm sorry, I don't understand why this thread needs to be preserved.

Don't know what the thread is myself, but presumably people other than just the thread starter contributed to it. Does hir desire to have contributions to it deleted outweigh the desire of those others to have their contributions still make sense?

Why don't you try to answer that without referring to the slippery slope argument, which frankly is logically flawed anyway.

I think Smoothly already did that perfectly well. Ze disagreed with the idea of deleting the post because ze believed it'd lead to the entire thread being put up for deletion as a result of it making little sense without that post. And that's apparently exactly what then happened, which rather proves the point.

Tryphena Absent

14:29 / 13.02.06

Randius, I'm asking why we need to preserve the thread.

Does hir desire to have contributions to it deleted outweigh the desire of those others to have their contributions still make sense?

If the post's content is almost entirely directed at the original post than yes, I think it probably does.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:38 / 13.02.06

Don’t deleted threads still come up on google?

I don't theenk so...

14:48 / 13.02.06

Aha. Clearly, I have no idea how google works, I’m always amazed at what it manages to find, frankly. I was just thinking that deleting a thread - as opposed to deleting all the posts and all the content in that thread - doesn’t actually make it vanish.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:49 / 13.02.06

Well, another problem here is that, whereas the current activity follows the logic of removing personal material from Barbelith relating to [name] - although I'd rather see a deletion than a text edit, because using text edit to remove all text - de facto delete with one less mod agreement required - seems to me to be gaming moderation - the rest of the thread contains personal information. From reading that thread it's pretty obvious that the message is:

[name], formerly known as [name], is feeling [condtion] and has been prescribed [medication].

We'd have to delete or substantively edit the thread to change that. Personally, I don't think the thread contains too much advice that cannot be found elsewhere on Barbelith (it's not like we're short of threads about [condition]), so... maybe deletion would be kindest? If we're feeling conscientious, we could PM the participants (those who remian on Barbelith) and ask them for their consent.

This gets more complex, of course, if this is the tip of an iceberg of mod requests...

Tryphena Absent

15:39 / 13.02.06

I don't see why people have a problem doing this in the context of the thread- we don't have to have a rule, we can determine this thread by thread.

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:55 / 13.02.06

Okay - so it looks like a deleted post is taken off the server - I mean, it is still stored somewhere, but the content is basically inaccessible - that makes it different from a deleted thread - a deleted thread is kept accessible, so you can go to it if you know the topic number, but when google asks what we have accessible Barbelith doesn't report it.

16:07 / 13.02.06

I'm not so sure, Haus. I just managed to find a deleted thread by googling its title.

ONLY NICE THINGS

16:30 / 13.02.06

Bum.

16:50 / 13.02.06

Oh. So, does this particular thread that you’re talking about at the moment definitely need deleting? Seems to me that it can’t simply be a matter of ‘why preserve this thread’ if all the content has to be wiped, post by individual post, in order to actually get rid of it.

Even if there's a case for doing it this one time as ‘the kindest thing’, it still looks like the sort of thing that would very clearly have to be the exception rather than the rule.

Tryphena Absent

17:21 / 13.02.06

Does anyone know why deleted threads are still reported? Obviously it's a bit of a problem but I'm just curious really.

17:36 / 13.02.06

To complicate matters further, it probably bears pointing out that posts made at the time of the thread in question were written in a pre-Google era, and at a time when (I think) users were able to delete posts without mod agreement. So current consensus on the rules of posting we have now (eg. that posters should accept that posts are effectively owned by the board rather than the user) didn't obtain then. In other words, [poster] might well not have posted what ze did if ze didn't think ze could delete later.

That said, I think we should resist deleting content without compelling circumstances. I thought the onus was on having reasons *to* delete things rather than good reasons *not* to. But I'd welcome being corrected if that's not the case.

I'm sorry, I don't understand why this thread needs to be preserved. Why don't you try to answer that without referring to the slippery slope argument, which frankly is logically flawed anyway.

Sorry not to reply sooner, Nina. I hope the above answers that question. I suppose it's about what general policy we should tend towards. I think preserving threads should be default, with good reason being required to deviate from that policy. And as has been said before, good reasons are essential for good moderation, IMO. It's not so much that I thought that [poster]'s posts definitely should not be deleted, just that at that stage I had read no compelling reason why they should.
As for slippery slopes, I'm not quite sure what you're on about. Unless you think that's the same thing as precedent and that precedent should play no role in moderation. In which case we should probably revisit the basic principles of moderating Barbelith. I think I'm doing it differently from you.

17:38 / 13.02.06

Does anyone know why deleted threads are still reported? Obviously it's a bit of a problem but I'm just curious really.

Because they're not deleted. They're just hidden from the index and search pages here, afaik.

Tryphena Absent

18:07 / 13.02.06

As for slippery slopes, I'm not quite sure what you're on about.

Earlier in the thread you said I worry about setting a precedent for posters removing key content that they just feel awkward, regretful or embarrassed about. That's basically what I would call a slippery slope argument because you're applying the idea that other people would be able to delete because we had allowed one person to do so.

I don't think that's the right way to approach incidents like this, I believe we should do it on a case by case basis because threads are not uniform. However editing seems like the best option anyway when deleted threads can still be read on a search engine. My argument is futile (shaking head pitifully).

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:35 / 13.02.06

I thought the onus was on having reasons *to* delete things rather than good reasons *not* to.

Yeah, I think that's right. As mentioned above, in this case there's the issue that the content is pre-googlability and also pre-moderator system, so the terms and expectations under which it was put down are different. To an extent, that's a risk you take with Internet content.

Hmmm.

Perfect world, I'd be happier if the user PMed a moderator and explained the request before making it. Personally, I don't entirely understand why this needs to be done (especially since email addresses are now universally hidden). However, this thread has no contemporary significance, no links to useful resources - it's basically people expressing symapthy/support. If those people feel that the best way to be supportive now is to efface their contributions or reference to the individual within them, it's probably best if the individual contacts them and asks.

18:42 / 13.02.06

Nina, so you do mean that using precedent to inform mod decisions requires some kind of logically flawed slippery slope argument. Hokay.

I still don't really understand what your objection to my concern about setting a precedent is. I agree that incidents like this should be approached on a case by case basis (in fact, all actions should probably be approached on that basis), but you still need some conventions by which to judge these things. And without a comprehensive, codified decision tree for all mod actions, precedent is one of the things we have with which to do that.

So, in the case of racist and (more recently) homophobic hate-speech, we have an established precedent for locking, deletion and referral to Tom. We also have precedents for deleting typos where requested by the poster, typos in topic titles regardless of whether they're requested by the poster, etc etc.

Those are the things I appeal to when making mod decisions. What do you do?

14:04 / 14.02.06

I have no objections to the deletion in this case and I'm surprised that some of you do. Partly, I don't see a great deal of value in Barbelith as an archive (I think a spring clean where we deleted everything would be great), but I realise that some of you feel differently. Howvever, in this case, I don't think anyone can seriously claim that there is enormous value to keeping the thread or the posts within it, and while I think this particular poster's urge to delete their contributions is a little bit of an overreaction, I see no reason to stand in the way of that.

I can't help but factor in the distress this person may be feeling which, for me, carries more weight than an appeal to the abstract principle of when to allow deletion.

Tryphena Absent

19:57 / 14.02.06

I can't help but factor in the distress this person may be feeling which, for me, carries more weight than an appeal to the abstract principle of when to allow deletion.

Yes, that's how I feel about this too. I think our senstivity to people is more important than any perception of barbelith as an archive.

On precedent- we as moderators make individual decisions about what to moderate. We don't need to deal with sensitive issues on the basis of precedent unless we feel compelled to by information that we have been given. I feel that precedent is there, not to govern every decision but to act as a guide when the issue of deletion or moderator action becomes a difficult one.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:31 / 14.02.06

I think our senstivity to people is more important than any perception of barbelith as an archive.

Exactly. Like in most areas of life, the actual ability to cause/alleviate harm is more important than any sbstract principle. This is why stuff like this should, I reckon, always be on a case-by-case basis.

02:03 / 15.02.06

Yes, I agree that in the case which prompted this thread, the distress of the poster was more important that the 'barbelith archive.'

I created this thead not to discuss a particular issue, but really because I was more interested in where we stand regarding post deletion for personal reasons.

For instance, where a thread has very personal references in it, but the thread was not started because of (or by the poster with) those personal references and he or she would now like them deleted, what do we do then?

If (as in the case initially discussed in the Mod Requests thread) a poster would really like personal stuff removed because having it here is causing them distress, should we remove it and risk leaving the thread disjointed?

Are we saying that personally upsetting posts from long ago can be deleted, and that doing so is more important than the thread they are in? If we're not saying that but are instead relating deletion to thread 'importance' who decides how important a thread is?

Should we perhaps consider (in the cases of deletion requests in large discussion threads) replacing the post with a moderation note stating that a post has been removed for personal reasons?

It seems a bit unfair to OK the deletion of personal posts in one thread but not perhaps in another. Whilst I understand that the threads still have to remain readable, deleting the first post of a thread is likely to make it fairly difficult to follow. If that's acceptable I think we also have to consider deleting personal posts in threads which have more archive 'value' and are not necessarily personally inititated.

08:38 / 15.02.06

Yeah - the thing about deleted posts being visible in Google is not ideal, is it. I'll see if I can fix that.

Generally though, my position is this - general edits to the board by users make it impossible to develop a coherent argument - people can just pull their posts out of threads where they've been objectionable to erase their own stupid histories, or to fuck up arguments that they're losing. Other people invest in these conversations too, and my opinion is that those people lose out if the people they're debating with 'cheat' (ie. "what are you arguing with, my post now says that I completely agree with you and that I'm really reasonable, rather than that you're a hedgehog fancier"). So I'm very much not keen in that functionality being in place to the general board at the moment.

Having said that there will of course be exceptions to the rules for people who have put information up that they'd rather not be in public, by accident or through clumsiness, and I think we're going to have to figure out on a case by case basis whether or not these are reasonable requests. People can PM a mod, ask them to make a change and then if they think it's reasonable and its ratified by their peers, then it will be so. If people really feel that they're not getting a fair treatment or that hte board should bend to their wills, the debate should come to the policy and in the end, I guess, I would end up being the final arbiter only if no other accomodation could be agreed.

Does that sound fair?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:55 / 15.02.06

I'd say so. It's pretty much what happened this time anyway, and I'd personally rather not have a hard and fast rule for something that is, by its very nature, going to be different every time.