This ATMB thread prompts me to OP this in the hopes that it can proceed without vitriol but with some introspective remarks.
For my two cents, I cannot imagine a situation where we’d want any old threads or posts be deleted. We are a community. Make of it what one will, we are a virtual and sometimes tangible community. The backbone of our identities are the written words shared by the world. ( Remembering that anyone can lurk the Dope for as long as they wish ).
I’d hate to have anyone’s threads or - worse, IMHO- posts deleted. We’re not talking about archiving thousands of hours of HiDef video here. It is not about storage space or cost. Seems to me that the remarks in that thread were pointed more at why we do or do not value threads that are not “current”. One poster posited a 6 year cut-off for saving threads.
Let us not delete any threads. For better or worse, we post our words and live with the results. As pointed out in the thread cited above, in very rare cases Admin may remove a post or thread permanently. Very rare, for very unusual reasons.
So, we set those situations aside and consider the entire history of SDMB threads and posts. I say never delete them.
I completely agree. Some old threads from this board, especially from GQ, are useful repositories of information that often cannot be readily found elsewhere. They are indexed by Google, so the information can be found. To delete them just because they are “old” would be an act of vandalism comparable to mass book burnings.
Even though some of my posts (even threads) have been embarrassing in retrospect, I realized at the time the risks of posting them. To have them deleted would prevent me from seeing the fool I was, which can be useful information whenever I get to feeling smug and complacent.
There are many such threads where others are the fools and I had the good fortune to keep my mouth shut in them. I’m satisfied that it balances out in the long haul.
Keep them all except for the drive-by spam shit that gets zapped within its first few hours. Nobody should mind being shed of them.
I was one of those that found the boards because of the “What if LOTR had been written by somebody else” thread.
Would I be right in saying that if that stupid proposal about deleting threads older than six years were adopted, that the LOTR thread would be deleted?
Am I mixing this board up with another one, or did they used to purge the database periodically? I remember being instructed to post to any inactive threads we wanted to save that hadn’t been posted to in a certain period, and I was sure that was here but a very long time ago. Definitely prior to the Winter of our Missed Content.
We do delete spam threads, and when we catch trolls, we sometimes delete their work (so as not to feed them.) Otherwise, we may close threads, but rarely do we delete them. We do have the occasional personal situation where someone wants us to delete a thread they started; generally, we do NOT comply – if it’s posted, it’s public and it’s too late. However, there have been a small number of exceptions. Otherwise, generally, no, we’re not about to start deleting posts just because they’re old, irrelevant, or personally distasteful.
1000 years from now, the Board could be a valuable resource for historians. Can you imagine if we could look at something similar from Old England a millennium ago?
I can maybe see an argument for auto-closing threads above some age. I don’t necessarily agree with it, since genuine answers can sometimes crop up after a very long dormancy, but I can see the argument.
Auto-deleting, though? There is certainly no benefit to it, and can be drawbacks.
).
