7 ms·

In addition to this, on the blogs that were migrated to the new platform (such as Raymond Chen's Old New Thing) all of the comments have been purged. That's ext

In addition to this, on the blogs that were migrated to the new platform (such as Raymond Chen's Old New Thing) all of the comments have been purged. That's extremely unfortunate because those comments had a lot of useful technical commentary on the blog posts.

mobilio 8y ago
Migrations issues... :(
- dooglius 8y ago
  Nope, it's due to GDPR (follow the "Sorry" link on https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=102234 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=10...)
  - adrianmsmith 8y ago
    Does anyone know why Microsoft believe that GDPR disallows comments? Or why GDPR does actually disallow comments in case that's the case?
    - mark-r 8y ago
      If you don't have a system in place to automatically cleanse user-submitted content, you have a liability. The chilling effect this has will only grow over time.
      - jeroenhd 8y ago
        I'm not sure what law that's included in, but it's not part of GDPR. Might be the copyright reform, but comments should still be fine with that.
        dao- 8y ago
        Not sure why this is being downvoted. "If you don't have a system in place to automatically cleanse user-submitted content, you have a liability" is indeed not part of GDPR as far as I know, nor does it seem to be the reason why the comments weren't migrated.
        grimjack00 8y ago
        Probably referring to "right of erasure"? If you want to delete your comments, but there is no mechanism for that, then Microsoft may be in violation of that part of GDPR.
        dao- 8y ago
        Yep, I said as much in another comment. The downvoted comment I replied to was still right -- the issue preventing MS from migrating comments doesn't appear to be liability due to a lack of filters, which isn't even part of GDPR.
        shkkmo 8y ago
        See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322
        mark-r 8y ago
        It could be that I'm confusing it with something else, it's hard when everything is named with meaningless acronyms. But I really thought it was something to do with GDPR even if the connection isn't immediately obvious.
        cyphar 8y ago
        You are thinking of Article 13 (the upload filter), which hasn't been passed yet. Not to be a pendant, but an initialism cannot be meaningless almost by definition -- it has to mean something otherwise it wouldn't be an initialism. GDPR means the "General Data Privacy Regulation". FWIW, I completely agree with you on the chilling effect of upload filters. But upload filters aren't part of GDPR by any stretch of the imagination.
      - numakerg 8y ago
        What about HN? Their response to deleting comments is halfway between the thumb and the pinky.
        dang 8y ago
        Yikes, that's false and not nice. We delete comments for people nearly every day. It's true that we don't allow wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. But we also don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. The idea is to balance the need to preserve history (community interest) and the need to protect users (individual interest). We don't get there perfectly, but I can tell you for sure that the vast majority of people who ask us about this end up happy with how we help them.
        Tecuane 8y ago
        My understanding of the policy matches the parent comment from communications I've had. Is this a recent policy change?
    - onli 8y ago
      It's not the case. But organizations as big as Microsoft are often paralyzed by lawyers.
      - evilotto 8y ago
        Their own lawyers, but also the ones that are itching for a big juicy target to sue.
      - ericlippert 8y ago
        I vividly remember the meeting I went to in 2003 with a bunch of Microsoft bloggers and lawyers -- it was one of the few times Raymond Chen and I were in the same room. :-) It was astonishing because of what the lawyers said: yes, it is a public relations risk to have ordinary employees communicating directly with the developer community, and we are willing to take on that risk if it dramatically improves our satisfaction metrics in the developer community. We were basically told "don't be stupid, don't share corporate secrets, comport yourselves professionally, keep it on-topic, and if there are legal problems, legal will handle them appropriately". I don't know that things would be the same today; it was a different time. But I'd hope so.
        onli 8y ago
        That's pretty great :) I mean, of course there are situations where legal is right and there are situations where a risk is taken because it's worth it, like in that situation. The newegg anti-patent-troll stance comes to mind as well. But being overly risk averse and having lawyers drive the company happens as well, and it might have happened with the comments here.
        jplayer01 8y ago
        That's pretty cool. Imo, I think it really paid off and I'm thankful to get the kind of insight into Microsoft that these bloggers managed to give. I think it humanized Microsoft and their developers for a lot of people (including me).
    - dao- 8y ago
      Couple of responses to that question here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=102234#comments-134436 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=10... Basically the old accounts couldn't be carried over and so users wouldn't be able to log in anymore to delete their comments.
      - addicted 8y ago
        Or more accurately, MS did not want to make the effort to carry it over. GDPR made it more expensive to port the comments, because it insisted that the user have control over their content. It did not prevent it from being done.
        WA 8y ago
        Control doesn’t mean that you need a user interface or an account management. It merely means that MS needs to respond to a request like "I posted this comment, please delete it". Furthermore, under GDPR you don’t have to delete everything a user has written. Only personal information. Although it’s probably easier to just delete the whole comment.
    - piokoch 8y ago
      The problem is the EU approach to GDPR enforcement. Fines are so huge that probably MS lawyer team decided not to take chances for something that does not bring revenue - some developers might cry on Twitter or Facebook for a week or two, but that would cost MS nothing. Unfortunately "right to be forgotten" has been wrongly defined in GDPR, if someone published something in a publicly available place, this shouldn't be removable on demand. I am perfectly for forcing companies to be obliged to delete its customers data if customer does not want make business with a said company or does not want to allow company to use the data for its business (like advertising), but this should not cover every random forum in the Internet. In fact this is the reason those independent forum will disappear soon or later and be moved to Facebook, which is rather sad and shows only how EU bureaucracy is inefficient - they wanted to restrict Facebook usage of private data, instead they only caused even more people to move to Facebook and give up their privacy.
  - pianom4n 8y ago
    You shouldn't be downvoted. This is literally the reason they linked.
  - shkkmo 8y ago
    See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322
  - Anthony-G 8y ago
    It’s really frustrating to see large influential companies continue to perpetuate misinformation about GDPR – legislation for the benefit of ordinary users. It’s doubly frustrating to see Hacker News users fall for it (other posters arguing that GDPR is not a valid reason for removing comments have been heavily downvoted). As an influential group themselves, Hacker News users continue to perpetuate these misunderstandings. There’s no provision in GDPR stating that users have the right to retract or amend content they have published. The GDPR is only concerned with personal data so comments should only be amended/removed if they contain information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person – which could be the comment author themselves or an entirely different other person. https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1554/determining-what-is-personal-data.pdf https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1554/de...
  - tracker1 8y ago
    sigh ... yeah, it's Microsoft a big company with lots of money. But it's not unlimited and not every case can be handled. It was decided that there wasn't time to move comments and put in controls to be able to migrate accounts and self delete, there likely also wasn't time for the effort it would take to put other controls in place AND actually do the migration of comments. In the end, they project is probably like any other, short on time, and not enough people to cover all the cases needed. As it is, it seems like it wasn't smooth, and comments would be a much larger complication. That doesn't mean it could never happen, just that it hasn't happened. GDPR is the reason for deciding it's easier to dump them than to migrate them AND provide the controls they would likely need in place. It may be a small number of requests, relatively speaking, but judging from what YouTube, twitter and the like receive, I can't blame MS for taking the easy route.
ericlippert 8y ago
That's terrible. Those comments were alternately hilarious and informative.
- hyperdimension 8y ago
  Well, except for Yuhong Bao most of the time... (: Oh, and we can't forget xpclient wanting his old Explorer search style back.
dao- 8y ago
You can still find the comments here: http://web.archive.org/web/20190301040236/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190301040236/https://blogs.msdn...
aquadrop 8y ago
The whole thing is an incredibly stupid move by Microsoft, very disappointing.
el_benhameen 8y ago
In a similar vein, I had one particularly obscure winapi bug that was discussed in some old msdn articles and blogs, but with no solution. Only after a few days of ramming my head into my keyboard did I do a wayback search and discover that a now-purged comment on one of the articles had had my solution all along.

mobilio 8y ago

Migrations issues... :(

dooglius 8y ago
Nope, it's due to GDPR (follow the "Sorry" link on https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=102234 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=10...)
- adrianmsmith 8y ago
  Does anyone know why Microsoft believe that GDPR disallows comments? Or why GDPR does actually disallow comments in case that's the case?
  - mark-r 8y ago
    If you don't have a system in place to automatically cleanse user-submitted content, you have a liability. The chilling effect this has will only grow over time.
    - jeroenhd 8y ago
      I'm not sure what law that's included in, but it's not part of GDPR. Might be the copyright reform, but comments should still be fine with that.
      - dao- 8y ago
        Not sure why this is being downvoted. "If you don't have a system in place to automatically cleanse user-submitted content, you have a liability" is indeed not part of GDPR as far as I know, nor does it seem to be the reason why the comments weren't migrated.
        grimjack00 8y ago
        Probably referring to "right of erasure"? If you want to delete your comments, but there is no mechanism for that, then Microsoft may be in violation of that part of GDPR.
        dao- 8y ago
        Yep, I said as much in another comment. The downvoted comment I replied to was still right -- the issue preventing MS from migrating comments doesn't appear to be liability due to a lack of filters, which isn't even part of GDPR.
        shkkmo 8y ago
        See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322
      - mark-r 8y ago
        It could be that I'm confusing it with something else, it's hard when everything is named with meaningless acronyms. But I really thought it was something to do with GDPR even if the connection isn't immediately obvious.
        cyphar 8y ago
        You are thinking of Article 13 (the upload filter), which hasn't been passed yet. Not to be a pendant, but an initialism cannot be meaningless almost by definition -- it has to mean something otherwise it wouldn't be an initialism. GDPR means the "General Data Privacy Regulation". FWIW, I completely agree with you on the chilling effect of upload filters. But upload filters aren't part of GDPR by any stretch of the imagination.
    - numakerg 8y ago
      What about HN? Their response to deleting comments is halfway between the thumb and the pinky.
      - dang 8y ago
        Yikes, that's false and not nice. We delete comments for people nearly every day. It's true that we don't allow wholesale deletion of account histories, because that would gut the threads the account had participated in. But we also don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. The idea is to balance the need to preserve history (community interest) and the need to protect users (individual interest). We don't get there perfectly, but I can tell you for sure that the vast majority of people who ask us about this end up happy with how we help them.
        Tecuane 8y ago
        My understanding of the policy matches the parent comment from communications I've had. Is this a recent policy change?
  - onli 8y ago
    It's not the case. But organizations as big as Microsoft are often paralyzed by lawyers.
    - evilotto 8y ago
      Their own lawyers, but also the ones that are itching for a big juicy target to sue.
    - ericlippert 8y ago
      I vividly remember the meeting I went to in 2003 with a bunch of Microsoft bloggers and lawyers -- it was one of the few times Raymond Chen and I were in the same room. :-) It was astonishing because of what the lawyers said: yes, it is a public relations risk to have ordinary employees communicating directly with the developer community, and we are willing to take on that risk if it dramatically improves our satisfaction metrics in the developer community. We were basically told "don't be stupid, don't share corporate secrets, comport yourselves professionally, keep it on-topic, and if there are legal problems, legal will handle them appropriately". I don't know that things would be the same today; it was a different time. But I'd hope so.
      - onli 8y ago
        That's pretty great :) I mean, of course there are situations where legal is right and there are situations where a risk is taken because it's worth it, like in that situation. The newegg anti-patent-troll stance comes to mind as well. But being overly risk averse and having lawyers drive the company happens as well, and it might have happened with the comments here.
      - jplayer01 8y ago
        That's pretty cool. Imo, I think it really paid off and I'm thankful to get the kind of insight into Microsoft that these bloggers managed to give. I think it humanized Microsoft and their developers for a lot of people (including me).
  - dao- 8y ago
    Couple of responses to that question here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=102234#comments-134436 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190313-01/?p=10... Basically the old accounts couldn't be carried over and so users wouldn't be able to log in anymore to delete their comments.
    - addicted 8y ago
      Or more accurately, MS did not want to make the effort to carry it over. GDPR made it more expensive to port the comments, because it insisted that the user have control over their content. It did not prevent it from being done.
      - WA 8y ago
        Control doesn’t mean that you need a user interface or an account management. It merely means that MS needs to respond to a request like "I posted this comment, please delete it". Furthermore, under GDPR you don’t have to delete everything a user has written. Only personal information. Although it’s probably easier to just delete the whole comment.
  - piokoch 8y ago
    The problem is the EU approach to GDPR enforcement. Fines are so huge that probably MS lawyer team decided not to take chances for something that does not bring revenue - some developers might cry on Twitter or Facebook for a week or two, but that would cost MS nothing. Unfortunately "right to be forgotten" has been wrongly defined in GDPR, if someone published something in a publicly available place, this shouldn't be removable on demand. I am perfectly for forcing companies to be obliged to delete its customers data if customer does not want make business with a said company or does not want to allow company to use the data for its business (like advertising), but this should not cover every random forum in the Internet. In fact this is the reason those independent forum will disappear soon or later and be moved to Facebook, which is rather sad and shows only how EU bureaucracy is inefficient - they wanted to restrict Facebook usage of private data, instead they only caused even more people to move to Facebook and give up their privacy.
- pianom4n 8y ago
  You shouldn't be downvoted. This is literally the reason they linked.
- shkkmo 8y ago
  See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19457322
- Anthony-G 8y ago
  It’s really frustrating to see large influential companies continue to perpetuate misinformation about GDPR – legislation for the benefit of ordinary users. It’s doubly frustrating to see Hacker News users fall for it (other posters arguing that GDPR is not a valid reason for removing comments have been heavily downvoted). As an influential group themselves, Hacker News users continue to perpetuate these misunderstandings. There’s no provision in GDPR stating that users have the right to retract or amend content they have published. The GDPR is only concerned with personal data so comments should only be amended/removed if they contain information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person – which could be the comment author themselves or an entirely different other person. https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1554/determining-what-is-personal-data.pdf https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1554/de...
- tracker1 8y ago
  sigh ... yeah, it's Microsoft a big company with lots of money. But it's not unlimited and not every case can be handled. It was decided that there wasn't time to move comments and put in controls to be able to migrate accounts and self delete, there likely also wasn't time for the effort it would take to put other controls in place AND actually do the migration of comments. In the end, they project is probably like any other, short on time, and not enough people to cover all the cases needed. As it is, it seems like it wasn't smooth, and comments would be a much larger complication. That doesn't mean it could never happen, just that it hasn't happened. GDPR is the reason for deciding it's easier to dump them than to migrate them AND provide the controls they would likely need in place. It may be a small number of requests, relatively speaking, but judging from what YouTube, twitter and the like receive, I can't blame MS for taking the easy route.

ericlippert 8y ago

That's terrible. Those comments were alternately hilarious and informative.

hyperdimension 8y ago
Well, except for Yuhong Bao most of the time... (: Oh, and we can't forget xpclient wanting his old Explorer search style back.

dao- 8y ago

You can still find the comments here: http://web.archive.org/web/20190301040236/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190301040236/https://blogs.msdn...

aquadrop 8y ago

The whole thing is an incredibly stupid move by Microsoft, very disappointing.

el_benhameen 8y ago

In a similar vein, I had one particularly obscure winapi bug that was discussed in some old msdn articles and blogs, but with no solution. Only after a few days of ramming my head into my keyboard did I do a wayback search and discover that a now-purged comment on one of the articles had had my solution all along.