In the not-too-distant future, traces of OpalCat’s online existence will disappear into the ether. The Fathom forum is already crawling under the weight of a thousand spammers, and will probably disappear along with her personal site and her many other Web projects, shortly after her web host or domain registrar get stiffed. It’s kind of sad to think it will all go “poof!”, but it’s going to happen.
OpalCat’s online presence will live on at the SDMB, of course. However, through the years, she posted a lot of messages about her son - probably thousands. His life was laid bare on the Dope. He also had no choice in what was put forward for the world to see.
The SDMB has a policy that posters must live with the consequences of their words, and that posts generally won’t be deleted. However, OpalCat’s son never made those posts about him; it was his mom. In the future, if Opalcat’s son asks that certain posts that he feels violates his privacy be removed, would the powers that be honor his request?
We very rarely edit or remove posts in those kinds of circumstances. We’ll do so if there is a very good reason, but a lot of people here talk about their families and deeply personal issues and they have a right to do so - the world doesn’t get veto power. If OpalCat’s son has an issue with a specific topic some time in the future, he can ask us about it and we’ll give it due consideration, but our preference is always going to be leaving things where they are.
While familiar with OpalCat, there are those of us that know no details about her son and are disinclined to try now to learn more. That should only increase in the future. So as long as these aspects don’t remain under active discussion, hopefully her son can expect some modicum of privacy in the future.
People publish articles and books about their relatives and acquaintances all the time, often including what may be sensitive information. I’m not sure how this is different.
I may be mis-remembering, as I seldom followed her tribulations, but weren’t her posts regarding him more about HER, with her son as more of an incidental player? For example, her son was in the room when she mutilated herself, but that was about what she was doing, not him.
This archive-mania is very strange to me. In a significant number of instances, when an old thread is revived, its age is noted and the thread is locked. So saving all these posts is not motivated by the thought that there may be active discussion in them once again.
Instead, old posts seem to be kept around strictly for the purpose of facilitating the accumulation of dossiers on posters. (There is a general undercurrent of vindictiveness in most SDMB rules/policies.)
If you can advise on another rationale regarding the saving policy (especially when coupled with the “we lock old revived threads” policy), I’d be interested in hearing it.
That’s a very negative view of the Straight Dope history and quite unfair to the community.
It’s also a veiled slap at the moderation team
We save everything – except for the portions that were lost in server crashes and other misfortune the entire timeline is there from the earliest days.
There is no discrimination made between innocuous and notorious. It’s just all there.
I don’t think the retention policy was initiated to facilitate dossiers, so to the extent that my post suggested that a cabal of moderators dreamt that up, I stated my position poorly and was needlessly accusatory. I think retention came about because it is the default setting.
I do think, however, the net effect of the policies (retention, locking old threads) in place now, however unintentional this may be, is to do little more than facilitate dossiers.
I am highly skeptical that a semiannual dump of all posts older than six years would be that difficult. I bet it would take less than ten minutes. (So twenty minutes a year.) Six years is long enough to encourage people to continue to be thoughtful about what they post, without keeping people tied to offhand remarks made during the Clinton Adminstration.
This is a procedure that should be adopted. I think the main opposition to this is going to be “Well, if you don’t want something you say to be online forever, you shouldn’t have said it. Tough shit!” (This is the vindictiveness I was mentioning, and it comes in both moderator and non-moderator varieties.) This is an especially hard-to-justify line given that in 2001, very few of us appreciated the immortality the Internet confers.
Overall, I don’t think we have great reasons to retain every post; I don’t think it would be that difficult to purge old posts; we tacitly admit the irrelevance of old posts by locking revived threads, and the main purpose old posts serve these days is too perpetuate sometimes decades-old animosities and embarrasments.
When the default procedures produce bad results that can be avoided by slight changes in protocol, we should welcome a new way of doing things.
How are people tied to offhand remarks from ten years ago? If someone were to dredge up an ancient post, can’t they simply make the argument that it was ten years ago and thus not particularly relevant to a current discussion? And what about the fact that people like to reread popular older threads? Or someone new to the board might like to actually read the posts that led to an inside joke or board meme? Why work to remove content?
Intellectually, yes, we all agree: we ought to be able to say “Well, that was a long time ago and I’ve learned a lot since then” and that should suffice. But, unfortunately, if people have got an axe to grind, they’ll take what they can get.
And I know that a deletion policy would not be without some casualities. My take on the balance is that more embarrassing / overly confessional / thoughtless content is out there than lasting content (within a vastly overwhelming ocean of ephemera (BBQ PIT, October 2004, “Effin’ drive-thru messed up my order AGAIN!”)).
I don’t think there is some universal truth, the Platonic Form of Internet Messageboard Retention Policy, out there. But I do think it is appropriate routinely to revisit the policy, to think about what it is we want to accomplish with the policy, to determine what it is we are actually accomplishing the policy, and to make some changes if those two deviate significantly.
In any event, elmwood’s post suggested a rule change, so repsonses such a Marley’s, to the effect of “No, our rule is that we keep it up” (Marley, elmwood already knew that! That’s why he wrote “The SDMB has a policy that posters must live with the consequences of their words, and that posts generally won’t be deleted.”) – should be a non-starter. At a minimum, a more reflective defense of the policy is called for.
I think you’re creating a situation that has a slim chance of ever even happening. The kid is now a full grown adult and don’t you think that if he’d wanted his presence know here it already would be? Even if it did happen, who cares? So his mom posted something here about him 10 years ago. Who gives a shit, it’s in the past.
This thread took a strange turn. Put very briefly, we don’t hide old threads because there’s no reason to delete them and people might want to read them. Like I said in the OP, we’ll hide them if there’s some compelling reason to do so. But if there isn’t, why would we delete some of the board’s history and deprive people of something they might like to read?
If this is meant seriously and not as some kind of parody, then it is a very strange viewpoint indeed. Only a tiny fraction of posts could be seen as reflecting negatively on posters - and even then most of them are only linked to someone’s anonymous online persona, not a real identity. It’s exceptional when someone’s IRL identity is known, as was the case with Opal.
Locking old threads has absolutely nothing to do with saving old threads, since locked threads can still be searched for, linked to, and read.
Old threads are kept because they are 1) frequently interesting; 2) rarely problematic.
Have you ever read any of her posts or threads? She had made those types of posts for years, took heat for them and did it all over again. And again. Go to her boards and check it out (a board that I know about because she posted about it here). She had been cautioned numerous times about posting that kind of personal info and she kept doing it. The point is that she knew exactly what she was doing. If she was fine about posting about her lifestyle then there is nothing wrong with referencing those posts in a thread about her and her family. Her son was aware then and I’m sure he is now.
Opal loved and surrounded herself with drama. There is nothing wrong with saying so and it’s not a slam to mention it.