Yep, that’s pretty much standard language for any commercial message board. Owners need the permanent, non-revocable right to publish so you can’t come back later and demand they do a ridiculous amount of work and decimate their archives by demanding everything you ever said be removed. They generally want it for any medium known or to be developed to cover changes in technology. Maybe that Web version 2 finally comes into being, and they decide to move the boards over, maybe they want to release the archives on CD, maybe they want to do an excerpts book.
Any commercial message board that doesn’t have such a clause in their terms and conditions has a very, very bad lawyer.
His reaction was extreme. Nonetheless, I have yet to see a good explanation as to why this clause was put in the registration agreement, besides calling him “stupid.” I don’t know if that particular poster was known for other egregious behaviors, but if he left the board because it violated his principles, I would call that anything but stupid. That’s removing the dissociation between what you think about the world and what you actually end up doing. This is a common theme we see on cognitive psychology - a dissociation between someone’s thoughts and their actual behavior. If he had the balls to actually act on his reasoning in the face of a group of SDMB fanboys, more power to him.
Um, that is baloney. Deleting all of a person’s posts upon request is incredibly simple to do.
Further, this is likely to occur with such a low frequency as to not go very far towards “decimating” the boards archives. If I were to ask to have my posts removed it would be a truly staggering depletion: 7,183,964-1,802. OMG! Decimation! END OF THE SDMB!
Seriously, if a person ponied up the dough to be a member for enough years to single-handedly represent a significant proportion of the SDMBs posts, it’s reasonable and respectful for the mods to go ahead and delete the posts, IMO. So what’s your next crackpot explanation?
So if you quit and ask for all your posts to be removed, and they hit the magic button that deletes all your posts, you then expect them to go through and manually edit everyone who ever quoted one of your posts as well? Because that’s what you’re proposing here.
No, but if you’re looking for children or harassing another member, reporting you to the ISP is a good idea, and some WILL suspend or terminate your account. In addition, if your ISP is your boss at work, well, you get the idea.
Look man, I’m a programmer, and databases don’t scare me. If you think it’s hard to do that you are very mistaken. And I know for a fact that in certain cases posters have requested that the Reader remove posts because they contained information that the poster later determined was too sensitive to have on the Internet, and they go ahead and remove them. So I find these claims to be mostly hand waving.
Single posts like those containing sensitive information, sure. Posts which you, yourself write, ok. Those would be easy to take care of. But posts, like this one, that I’m quoting. You can see (or maybe you can’t, which is the problem) that even if you “wrote some code” to go through and strip out everything in between quote tags that had your name near it, you would A)still not get it all because some posters don’t use the convention and we haven’t had the QUOTE= thing for all that long, and B)severely screw up some threads.
That’s not even considering what happens if one removes the OP of a thread and the OP’s posts throughout that thread. Gibberish would result.
We do this extremely rarely, and only for extremely good reason. To the best of my remembery, it’s been done twice since I became a mod. Even then, it is only removing one post.
Why is the fact that the Reader shares use of your posts troublesome to you?
If they aren’t planning on reposting my writing with complete disrespect to my wishes, they shouldn’t reserve that privilege. If they are planning on it, well, that makes me angry. The statement in question should be replaced with one that is more conditional, more thoughtful, and less evil, IMHO.
Horsecrap. Databases, searches, commands, and other technowhatever will do NOTHING to guarantee that ALL of your content gets removed. Note, for example, that the quote above is unattributed. Unless you want the admins to delete a lot less, or a lot more, than “everything the ex-poster wrote,” it’s going to require going through every thread he posted in, finding every post that quotes him, and deleting his words from all such posts. You, apparently, think it would be satisfactory to only delete his original posts, or to delete entire threads full of other people’s original content, I’m not sure which. Either way, it’s clear that you have no idea what you’re proposing.
ETA: Forget it. Having seen your last response to Frank, you’re just a contrarian asshole.
Well, he was once a poster. He was warned. He continued to violate the rules of the Board. He was suspended for a month. He reregistered more than once under a different name. He didn’t leave the board because of his principles. The Board left him.
The fact that, given the wide ranging rights I gave the Reader when I signed up here, they are not required to attribute my own work to me. That is evil, and that’s why the Creative Commons was created - so I could pick the rights they have. I would be happy to grant the reader an attribution license. What i’m really wondering is how much thought was put into the statement. I’m not a grammar nazi, but it doesn’t look like this statement was vetted by a lawyer. It’s pretty important, given that they are assigning themselves rights to the works of tens of thousands of people.
