Why have all (but 7!) of Dottie's posts disappeared? Not just had their content edited out, but literally disappeared, as though they had never been there?

This makes a nonsense of many old threads, in which the rest of the discussion no longer makes sense - people often respond to what someone said without quoting them.

As far as I can see [ETA, this wasn't past the nose on my face, so this sentence is false], this isn't something any user can do themselves; it takes board administrator intervention. May I suggest, for the future, that it isn't a good idea? The past threads are a useful resource for everyone, and they would be much less useful if this became a regular occurrence.

Ah, you're right. I have selective vision on this board - it's not the first time I've failed to notice a feature that was obvious once someone pointed it out. I don't do this in general, honest!

Well, other people: please don't do this wholesale ;-)

ETA err, that [SPAM] corresponds to the fact that I used a word spelled w-h-o-l-e-s-a-l-e - does that get through? :-)

Okay-- Mark (or Dottie, for that matter) can feel free to correct me here, but I'm going to offer an explanation as I'm (elsewhere) a message board administrator myself.

1. Intellectual property issues: who 'owns' the content that an individual user posts on a message board? Is it the board administrator/host? The community of the board? Or the user who made the post?

I can't speak for Davidson's message boards, but in the case of the site I'm an Admin for, it's the individual. Kind of, anyway. The thing is, we WILL NOT (with a few highly limited and TBD/as-needed situations) eliminate someone's posts in a quote by another member... but we also will NOT prevent a person from gutting a thread by deleting their own posts. Yes, this is deeply unfortunate, and we do try to discourage people from doing this. But ultimately, it is their intellectual property, as well as a conversation within the community.

2. Sometimes, one's opinion changes, or one's perspective does, or one's need for anonymity/privacy does. When that happens, a member may quietly opt to delete themselves from a public message board by deleting posts.

Aside from reminding members that people reading can-- and often DO!-- benefit from reading even old posts... there really isn't much that can be done about it. Message boards that "hold hostage" the words of members (by not allowing editing past some window) don't tend to be very active because they make people wary of sharing freely.

Our own board has dealt with the community's need to have older threads at least make SOME kind of sense even after member edit/deletions via eliminating the post-delete option for all but our moderators. That way, nothing stops a member from basically reducing a post to:


But at least the entry doesn't vanish from the thread as though it wasn't ever there to begin with, if that makes sense.

You're explaining what I could equally have explained myself, and I've also, many times, administered message boards. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. Partly this was because I misunderstood the situation, thinking that it necessarily must have been done by an administrator.

What I do think is that it's legally (though IANAL) and morally unnecessary, and a really bad idea, for board administrators to provide (turn on, typically) an option that allows users to delete the post as well as its contents. The alternative you allude to, allowing people to edit a post however they like, is far more benign, as it alerts later readers to the fact that something was deleted, and prevents much confusion.

(While I'm pontificating, though, I also think it's asking for trouble to permit posts to be edited after they've been replied to without the post being marked as edited. The moral is, always quote the post you're replying to, but I don't do this reliably myself.)

Whilst I completely take the point that there can be good reasons for deleting posts, I feel this is something that it's reasonable for a community to disapprove of as a general rule. Posting on a board is entering into a conversation, and there's a moral sense in which the ownership of the sense (or nonsense :-) in that conversation is shared, not sensibly partitionable between the participants. I for one would not stay here long if I started noticing often that people were deleting posts.

As a new member who has been reading up on past posts, and specifically those related to testing, the missing posts have been troubling to me. This thread is helpful!

There are many instances when Dottie has presumably offered very helpful insight, as the OP will allude to Dottie's comment and express gratitude, and I have scrolled up and down wondering what I'm missing! I was starting to think perhaps only certain people could see her comments and there was something wrong with my account.

Absolutely. This is how I personally feel about it-- I lean toward "community property" and a posts-as-conversation model, myself.

Privacy reasons-- absolutely understandable.
My other message board community has-- okay, even 'repeatedly'-- been the victim of the sulking, taking-my-toys-with-me hairflip variety of mass deletions, too.

That's a big part of why we REALLY turned off the ability for regular members to delete posts. They can edit them to their hearts' content, but not make it as though they never posted in the first place.

We also have a 60 or 90s window for edits in which no edit notice is auto-generated on the post; after that, there's a notice generated, and it's standard, not user-generated or optional.


I have to say that I think that both of those things are quite helpful in terms of running things smoothly and minimizing flame-wars that take moderator/administrator time.

We're using an open-source platform, though-- and some other pre-fab things are not so customizable without breaking into the code in a pretty hard-core manner. We didn't have some options with our older platform.