Comments | suggestions: deleting posts

eyelid in suggestions

deleting posts

Aug 27, 2009 14:09

Title
deleting posts

Short, concise description of the idea
It would be nice if we could delete posts we'd made in communities even if we have been banned from those communities.

Full description of the idea
See above. I'm mostly just wanting to clean up after youthful peccadillos ;)
An ordered list of benefits

I think it helps ensure privacy, and ( Read more... )

entry deletion, entries, banned users, community membership, § migrated

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charliemc September 29 2009, 06:59:13 UTC

I guess this takes us to the argument of whether comments belong to the user posting them or to the community they've been posted to.

I'm always surprised when a comment 'goes away' suddenly at a community. As a community moderator for several communities, I find it sad when comments disappear...

Just my two cents worth...

scien September 29 2009, 07:32:04 UTC

I think LJ's firmly come down on the side of belongs to the poster.

charliemc September 29 2009, 08:44:40 UTC

Yeah, yeah, I totally get that...

There are just times when I hate to see a comment go, is all...

azurelunatic September 29 2009, 07:59:51 UTC

LJ has consistently come down on the side of the comment being deletable by the person who posted it; I believe whole posts get the same thing.

charliemc September 29 2009, 08:45:12 UTC

Yeah, I totally get that. I do.

But I still hate to see some comments go away, even so...

gillen September 29 2009, 09:10:22 UTC

Perhaps so, but it's the wrong position.

azurelunatic September 29 2009, 09:29:41 UTC

I am not sure what steps LJ would have to take for it to be legally ok for them to keep serving a comment or post that its creator (who is generally the copyright owner) wants to delete or be made inaccessible. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't have to.

If LJ tried to change its policies so that the creator of any text was not able to delete it at will, especially since the ability to do so has existed pretty much since day 1, I guarantee that there would be an explosion the likes of which has never been seen on LJ before, especially once Slashdot, El Reg, and the various internet legal organizations picked up on it. Selling the company to the Russians and terminating a good chunk of the US office would be nothing.

mskala September 29 2009, 12:27:44 UTC

Is that really true? It's obvious that the users would be very upset, but I don't think it's clear that there would be any legal problems, let alone insurmountable legal problems. Very many - maybe even most - other Web log systems allow people to post comments without giving them any automated way to delete the comments afterward. This is especially true of systems like Blogspot where it is the rule rather than the exception for people to post comments without having an account. It's hard to allow deletion when there's no persistent identity. These systems don't get in trouble for it.

Let's not confuse what what we think is right, with actual legal restrictions.

azurelunatic September 29 2009, 13:10:44 UTC

I am not entirely sure where something crosses the line from "so you said stupid stuff on the internet that you would now like to disappear, too bad" and goes into a viable case for a DMCA claim that would be upheld if it went to court, rather than being enough for LJ Abuse to insist that something be taken down.

Someone I know got something taken down because it was reproducing one of their comments, about a paragraph worth, without authorization.

mskala September 29 2009, 13:23:09 UTC

The possibility that people can file DMCA notices is a very far cry from Livejournal necessarily being in trouble if they don't provide an unconditionally-available deletion feature to all users.

eyelid September 29 2009, 15:18:07 UTC

I have to disagree there. I think people should own their own words. I really like that LJ has protected that for us to a large extent. I know most other users appreciate it too.

eyelid September 29 2009, 15:16:08 UTC

I'm a community moderator too, and in at least one of my communities (abortioninfo) we try to tag/memory file posts because of their usefulness to future members. So I feel where you are coming from here. Still, if one of my members wanted to delete their post or comment to ensure their privacy or whatnot, I would never want to stop them. It would feel like a violation of their trust to me.

mlady_rebecca September 30 2009, 06:58:29 UTC

I'm always surprised when a comment 'goes away' suddenly at a community. As a community moderator for several communities, I find it sad when comments disappear...

I feel the same way. Because sometimes a comment vanishing destroys all context for a discussion.

And, if a whole post can be ripped away, a whole discussion existing in the comments may be destroyed. Even when the original post did nothing but spark the discussion, and the value to the community is in the discussion itself.

Plus, if I ban someone from my community (or my personal journal), I don't think they should be able to alter that journal in any way, including "cleaning up" evidence of their past misdeeds.

eyelid September 30 2009, 14:45:10 UTC

Plus, if I ban someone from my community (or my personal journal), I don't think they should be able to alter that journal in any way, including "cleaning up" evidence of their past misdeeds.

Why not? Who really cares... I mean, it's your community and they're banned. I'm a mod of various communities, and I don't really care about keeping a record of Evil Deeds.

And, if a whole post can be ripped away, a whole discussion existing in the comments may be destroyed.I guess, but I think that there is also a community value in respecting people's wishes regarding their privacy and control over their own words. I would not want to keep posts or comments on my community against the will of the person who posted them. to me that feels like a betrayal of my community members ( ... )

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