5 ms·

Nearly all forums do this or some form of this. Your account and personal information may be deleted, but all of your comments, submissions, conversations, thr

by buro9 13y ago

Nearly all forums do this or some form of this. Your account and personal information may be deleted, but all of your comments, submissions, conversations, threads or whatever you call the collected bulk of user generated content will remain. The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours. The general stance is that a conversation is an audited history, and to change the historical record affects other people's content too by redefining the context. Taking this very conversation as an example if you deleted your account and your comment, mine now makes far less sense. Most forum admins agree that you have the right to edit your content, but not to modify/affect someone else's. Changing the historical record affects the content of others. Thus, most forums will ask for the right to reproduce your user content even after your account has been deleted. This preserves the context of other people's content. Beyond that... account deletion. The internals of most forum software is based on foreign keys or data structures that presume integrity of the data. To delete a user account whilst retaining the content created by the account breaks their software. So for a lot of forums deleting a user actually means keeping the user record but scrubbing it of identifiable information. The problem then comes that whilst the account may no longer exist in a meaningful sense, the content might still have personal identifiable information and will now be orphaned and detached from any meaningful record of ownership. Liability just became a nightmare for the forum admin. The question of how to handle work contributed to a collective work that is a forum is a sticky one. But ultimately the value of the forum to the people who will continue to use it is based on the collective work remaining intact. The content will always survive, and then it's just implementation that dictates what deletion of an account really means for the given piece of software.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
> The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours. Sure, but what about posts that have no replies? And what about a cascade, that is, poster B replies to poster A, poster A deletes their account, the post remains, poster B deletes their account, both posts disappear? I don't care about HN or Skype as much, but when I get my commenting system done I will look into doing something like that. I do believe in letting people and their content go. It's like making a party: yes, if people start leaving the party will be less fun, but it's more fun that way for the people leaving, and the rest ought to cope; considering one day they might want to leave as well. And while link rot sucks, so does everything just growing and only growing all the time. Let the web be a jungle, a living thing, and let things die, too? In the tiny part of this garden I attend to, that's how it's going to be. If in doubt, it's a zen thing ^^ At any rate, I don't really see the "liability nightmare", since it's already a fact that if you post something on a forum for 5 seconds, someone could take a screenshot and reproduce it until the end of time -- liability remains with the people posting stuff in the first place. It's just a matter of politeness to reduce this as much as you can on your end for anyone who wants to take something back, to do your part, without that implying any promises -- the way I see it, you loose some content, but you gain other content, because people know it's not necessarily etched in stone, and can try themselves out. Again, I'm not complaining about how any site handles this, and I'm happy to post on HN. But Plutarch said the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled, right? Likewise, I believe in the process of the web much more than any heap of "content" it might produce. And at least for what little own content I have on my site, I intend to curate it every now and then, check for broken or obsolete things. I'm not even above editing year old blog posts, the whole point is that should I die, I will leave the best of what I made and thought, not just an endless "log" like toilet paper. If in 10 years some of what you wrote today doesn't strike you as silly and outright false, what did you do in those 10 years? Public spaces like HN and reddit and slashdot I feel are different from that -- you get a lot out of them, and for that you give up "exclusive ownership" for what you said. This is fine, but I could see that a private or small community might feel similarly like I feel about private things; they don't exist for the sake of historians or lurkers, but for what they have with each other. When that ends, there is no need to keep it around. What does it profit a person if they gain all the content of the world, but lose their ability to reinvent themselves, right? Not everything is a wiki, not everything has to be revision controlled, not every conversation is about timeless facts, or facts at all.
higherpurpose 13y ago
Even so, my guess is Microsoft is keeping the connection between your previous name and the new one, so it's completely pointless to do it like this from the user's perspective.
- buro9 13y ago
  That's a good point, I wouldn't want that. I'll look at our own systems and will consider scrubbing all IP addresses/logs and anything that could identify a deleted user after the user has been deleted.
product50 13y ago
reddit doesn't do this You can delete your account and all your associated comments if you want to.
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
  Works with Google+ too.
- jedrek 13y ago
  Yeah... And it makes a lot of older threads nearly unreadable...
greatsuccess 13y ago
Why are you conflating deleting threads with deleting accounts? Its a simple matter to retain comments and delete a user. Remember we have these things called "computers"? You just delete the account and rename the reference in the comment stream (account deleted). I swear sometimes the puffery on here belies the imagination. Also referring to this or any forum as a "collective work" is a nice term of art, used by people who write TOS to claim "they" own "your" information. So its really an authoritarian top down data vacuum, not a collective work.
simoneau 13y ago
The tension between owning your own words and building a discussion collaboratively has been debated a long time. The first time I saw this was in 1997 about events on The WELL in 1992: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html Search for "mass scribble".
cliveowen 13y ago
I believe users should always be in control of their data (and since it's been produced by them, it their data). Also, if their software breaks after deleting an account the problem is entirely on their part.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > and since it's been produced by them, it their data I've never understood this definition of property, especially since it necessitates so much giving-away of property in order to make society function.
- e1ven 13y ago
  This becomes difficult when you are dealing with distributed systems. Let's use email as an example - I can close my Gmail account, and Google can delete all of my data off of their systems. There is nothing that either Google or I can do, however, to ensure that everyone I ever sent an email to will delete those messages as well. The messages are now on their computers, out of my reach. This becomes more evident when it's not a 1:1 message, but a 1:many message, such as Usenet (or Tavern) Like Gmail, you can delete your account locally, but there's nothing anyone can do that would force other servers to delete the messages they received. Once it's gone, it's gone. Another example where you might see this is XMPP->XMPP. My AIM client can keep a log of your messages, and even if you delete your AIM account, my logs will remain. I can entirely understand where you are coming from, but with some classes of systems, I don't know that it's possible to ensure that your data can be entirely erased.
  - cliveowen 13y ago
    It's not an all-or-nothing scenario, you should let users delete everything they can and let the rest be.
- buro9 13y ago
  > I believe users should always be in control of their data Total control? Does the person who made this submission have the right to delete it even though by doing so they delete your data? Do other users have the right to delete your data? Total control for you means denying someone else the right to delete this conversation. Do other users have the right to redefine your data by changing the context surrounding it? If you posted "I vote for this too" to some very sound proposal to allow changing of usernames, and then the original author changed the proposal to "Bestiality should be legal", thus suggesting to the world you support such a thing... did the other user have right through the control of their data to substantial modify the context of your data? To the point that the other person could create a personal liability for you? Where do the lines start and end, if your content can stand alone then the issues are not there. Almost everything in a forum is a discussion, conversation, argument, debate, an interaction depending on the context of other people's content. The minutes of those things are a record of fact, that someone said something and someone else replied and said something else. Content on a forum is never detached from the content of others. I agree you have the right to your data, but disagree someone has the right to modify those minutes, those records of fact, to impact the data of other people in any way. A forum is a collective work, and the rules for a collective work are different to the rules of a personal work.

by buro9 13y ago

PavlovsCat 13y ago

> The reason for this is that a forum is a collaborative effort, a collective work, and the contributions of other people's content might only make sense in the context of yours. Sure, but what about posts that have no replies? And what about a cascade, that is, poster B replies to poster A, poster A deletes their account, the post remains, poster B deletes their account, both posts disappear? I don't care about HN or Skype as much, but when I get my commenting system done I will look into doing something like that. I do believe in letting people and their content go. It's like making a party: yes, if people start leaving the party will be less fun, but it's more fun that way for the people leaving, and the rest ought to cope; considering one day they might want to leave as well. And while link rot sucks, so does everything just growing and only growing all the time. Let the web be a jungle, a living thing, and let things die, too? In the tiny part of this garden I attend to, that's how it's going to be. If in doubt, it's a zen thing ^^ At any rate, I don't really see the "liability nightmare", since it's already a fact that if you post something on a forum for 5 seconds, someone could take a screenshot and reproduce it until the end of time -- liability remains with the people posting stuff in the first place. It's just a matter of politeness to reduce this as much as you can on your end for anyone who wants to take something back, to do your part, without that implying any promises -- the way I see it, you loose some content, but you gain other content, because people know it's not necessarily etched in stone, and can try themselves out. Again, I'm not complaining about how any site handles this, and I'm happy to post on HN. But Plutarch said the mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled, right? Likewise, I believe in the process of the web much more than any heap of "content" it might produce. And at least for what little own content I have on my site, I intend to curate it every now and then, check for broken or obsolete things. I'm not even above editing year old blog posts, the whole point is that should I die, I will leave the best of what I made and thought, not just an endless "log" like toilet paper. If in 10 years some of what you wrote today doesn't strike you as silly and outright false, what did you do in those 10 years? Public spaces like HN and reddit and slashdot I feel are different from that -- you get a lot out of them, and for that you give up "exclusive ownership" for what you said. This is fine, but I could see that a private or small community might feel similarly like I feel about private things; they don't exist for the sake of historians or lurkers, but for what they have with each other. When that ends, there is no need to keep it around. What does it profit a person if they gain all the content of the world, but lose their ability to reinvent themselves, right? Not everything is a wiki, not everything has to be revision controlled, not every conversation is about timeless facts, or facts at all.

higherpurpose 13y ago

Even so, my guess is Microsoft is keeping the connection between your previous name and the new one, so it's completely pointless to do it like this from the user's perspective.

buro9 13y ago
That's a good point, I wouldn't want that. I'll look at our own systems and will consider scrubbing all IP addresses/logs and anything that could identify a deleted user after the user has been deleted.

product50 13y ago

reddit doesn't do this You can delete your account and all your associated comments if you want to.

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
Works with Google+ too.
jedrek 13y ago
Yeah... And it makes a lot of older threads nearly unreadable...

greatsuccess 13y ago

Why are you conflating deleting threads with deleting accounts? Its a simple matter to retain comments and delete a user. Remember we have these things called "computers"? You just delete the account and rename the reference in the comment stream (account deleted). I swear sometimes the puffery on here belies the imagination. Also referring to this or any forum as a "collective work" is a nice term of art, used by people who write TOS to claim "they" own "your" information. So its really an authoritarian top down data vacuum, not a collective work.

simoneau 13y ago

The tension between owning your own words and building a discussion collaboratively has been debated a long time. The first time I saw this was in 1997 about events on The WELL in 1992: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_well_pr.html Search for "mass scribble".

cliveowen 13y ago

I believe users should always be in control of their data (and since it's been produced by them, it their data). Also, if their software breaks after deleting an account the problem is entirely on their part.

saraid216 13y ago
> and since it's been produced by them, it their data I've never understood this definition of property, especially since it necessitates so much giving-away of property in order to make society function.
e1ven 13y ago
This becomes difficult when you are dealing with distributed systems. Let's use email as an example - I can close my Gmail account, and Google can delete all of my data off of their systems. There is nothing that either Google or I can do, however, to ensure that everyone I ever sent an email to will delete those messages as well. The messages are now on their computers, out of my reach. This becomes more evident when it's not a 1:1 message, but a 1:many message, such as Usenet (or Tavern) Like Gmail, you can delete your account locally, but there's nothing anyone can do that would force other servers to delete the messages they received. Once it's gone, it's gone. Another example where you might see this is XMPP->XMPP. My AIM client can keep a log of your messages, and even if you delete your AIM account, my logs will remain. I can entirely understand where you are coming from, but with some classes of systems, I don't know that it's possible to ensure that your data can be entirely erased.
- cliveowen 13y ago
  It's not an all-or-nothing scenario, you should let users delete everything they can and let the rest be.
buro9 13y ago
> I believe users should always be in control of their data Total control? Does the person who made this submission have the right to delete it even though by doing so they delete your data? Do other users have the right to delete your data? Total control for you means denying someone else the right to delete this conversation. Do other users have the right to redefine your data by changing the context surrounding it? If you posted "I vote for this too" to some very sound proposal to allow changing of usernames, and then the original author changed the proposal to "Bestiality should be legal", thus suggesting to the world you support such a thing... did the other user have right through the control of their data to substantial modify the context of your data? To the point that the other person could create a personal liability for you? Where do the lines start and end, if your content can stand alone then the issues are not there. Almost everything in a forum is a discussion, conversation, argument, debate, an interaction depending on the context of other people's content. The minutes of those things are a record of fact, that someone said something and someone else replied and said something else. Content on a forum is never detached from the content of others. I agree you have the right to your data, but disagree someone has the right to modify those minutes, those records of fact, to impact the data of other people in any way. A forum is a collective work, and the rules for a collective work are different to the rules of a personal work.