Please don’t expect the community to give you answers to your questions which you then delete right afterwards. Those of us who put time into answering your questions are not doing so just to serve your personal needs, we are here to help build a community knowledge base that others can search and reference.
This has become a chronic issue with Lemmy and its starting to feel like it’s a waste of time to answer questions.
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Well OP. Looks like your post resulted in a moderator resigning and the appointment of two new moderators in this community. As I’ve said previously, it was a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3, and not users deleting them after getting the answer.
Let’s hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
Thank you for the update!
Oh my GOD that’s probably what happened to mine! I was discussing something on my last post and then suddenly the mod removed it because of “Rule 3”. Because we were talking about selfhosting. Which, all selfhosting is on our own hardware…, but I think my post leaned more hardware than the mod liked. Super annoying when you’re having a valid conversation, people are chiming in and helping, and then suddenly Removed: Arbitrary rule violation.
Let’s hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
Wow! I just noticed that. Shit moves quickly on the tubes. Welcome our new overlords!
And I’ll use your comment as my post here for a local mod appointment of my lw account!
Hey, you made it!
a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3
…stretch by which party? in the sense that the post not really about self-hosting (and OP tried to use rule 3 in a stretched interpretation), or that the post was about self-hosting but moderator applied it in unnecessarily strict way? The way you phrased it seems like the former, but then why would that result in moderator resigning?
(I’m not a native English speaker so sorry if it should have been clear.)
To give you some context, I initially made this comment on OP’s post. Then I followed up with this comment after the resignation of a moderator on !selfhosted@lemmy.world.
I was referring to the former moderator’s very bizarre interpretation of Rule 3. You’ll see in the modlogs that many posts that were clearly about selfhosting getting removed under Rule 3.
Have you checked the modlogs to see if the posts you’re talking about were deleted by the mods? The mods here seem to really not want this community to be a support community and will delete it under Rule 3.
Realistically, a platform where you can delete your own questions so that they disappear for everyone isn’t the best platform for technical support communities. But a platform where you can’t delete your own posts is not the best platform for for a lot of other things, like privacy.
Two use cases without overlap seems like a good argument that there should be two different platforms.
Better than fucking Discord. I won’t even engage with a project that uses Discord as it’s support channel. Fuck that.
Fediverse is not private in any sense. Anything you post (or up/downvote) is blasted out to every federated instance and only gets deleted if that instance respects the delete command, which you cant rely on.
Too many people are ignorant of this.
I have a belief (not based in law, just my personal feeling) that once you post something in a conversation in a public forum, you no longer have any natural right to control it. By posting it in a conversation on the public internet, you have, in a practical sense, waved any right to control it. That is a part of a conversation that belongs to the public, and you gave your comment away freely. It is public record. You cannot demand that it be forgotten or erased any more than I can demand that something I said to my friends yesterday be forgotten and erased.
If I hosted a forum, I would make it clear that this is the policy, and I would not allow people to delete comments that they posted. Edits would be allowed, but the history would be available. Deletions would only ever happen if I was legally compelled.
This all gets complicated if someone posts private information about a third party. I would rapidly delete such posts and ban such users. The third party never consented to anything, so it’s not the same.
Fully agree. I wish people hadn’t started using their real names on the internet, it’s made privacy so much more of a concern than it had any reason to be in the age of @GoombaStomp69.
this really sucks. can’t they just lock comments or something
This is more likely the answer. I’ve seen multiple popular posts get deleted from here. I wish Lemmy did the soft delete method instead so that history is kept.
Is it people deleting specific posts, or people deleting their accounts? I do find it kind of weird that when you delete your account, it deletes all the data you contributed. Maybe it’s the right choice though, IDK.
I did notice a post that was looking for help, then apparently labelled “solved”… then deleted for some reason. 😞
DenverCoder9 strikes again?
Was it this one?
Mod Removed Post Extending A LUKS Encrypted HDD To Utilize All Of The Drive (500 GB) [SOLVED] reason: Rule 3
Oh yes that was it!
So, mod removed. I feel less annoyed. 😄
Has that been happening a lot here?
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it’s happening.
Lemmy in general, yes. Here in self hosted at least a couple of times that I’ve seen. Including earlier today. But I don’t interact on every post.
I only find out because sometimes I like to go back to posts I comment on and see what additional information people have offered. (There’s always something to learn.) Then I find the post has been deleted.
Is there any way for a community to disallow post deletion? If not, this seems like a needed feature.
or maybe a feature where posts cannot be deleted past a time period + amount of engagement.
Good point. If a post is two minutes old with no replies, may as will let folks change clean up their misclicks.
These would have to be added to Lemmy development, because currently I can delete a post of my own on a community on another instance and there isn’t a technical way to prevent it. Reporting and banning for behavior is tricky too unless you manage to remember the username of who posted it.
So, that’s an uphill battle at the development level and the moderation level.
What if I accidentally posted to the wrong community? Or posted something with a username/password in it? Or accidentally selected a picture of my penis wearing a little monocle and top hat to this community?
Requesting mod action would probably work.
Unless there is no active mod.
maybe just edit it to omit those info? (we don’t preserve edit history right?)
I absolutely detest how on lemmy deleting a post also nukes access to the comments. They’re still there, but there’s no way in many normally lemmy UI to get to them.
That seems like a client-side UI issue though. I’m sure you could get that request into the dev roadmap of your preferred client.
Unfortunately it seems most major Lemmy clients (https://join-lemmy.org/apps) are small or individual projects, some of which are closed source or use their public repos just for transparency. Seems like a relatively easy feature to build though if the APIs still spit out all the required data after deletion.
Are you sure the post wasn’t modded? Those also show up as “deleted”.
I see now there were 3 posts removed in the past that all seen relevant to the community me. Going back I see ones I’ve read and interacted with.
Seems like it might be more mod actions to me, as others have pointed out. Maybe a more general self hosted community if the mod doesn’t want those sorts of (relevant to selfhosters but not specifically selfhost software announcements or whatever) posts here.
I’ve made a couple of posts here and there to get some answers on how to do certain things, as I’m really new to this whole self-hosting thing. But after some time my thread gets auto-deleted, often before I can even get a solid answer to my question.
So, if /c/SelfHosted isn’t where I should post beginner questions for the community to help me, where should I post? The sidebar provides no link to something like that.
It sticks around in other software just FYI. Maybe lemmy should have something that admins can do? Maybe something super admins can re-instate if a mod states should be un-deleted? I dunno.
I’ve never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.
They didn’t
It happens on reddit all the time as well
No it doesn’t. If someone on Reddit deletes there post, the comments are all still visible.
Does deleting the root post nuke the whole thread?
I dont think so. So quoting the original post would be an effective solution.
The post yes, the comments no. You can’t view the post any more. Here’s one that was removed by the mod, but the effect is the same: https://lemmy.zip/post/65524914
Comments on a post still exist in that user’s history, and you can see those, but you can’t see them in context.
Quote ppl you answer.
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
works for deleted comments, but not when the entire post is nuked
True
that will help somewhat in the future when lemmy gets its shit together, but since I came to lemmy deleted posts cannot be loaded at all, even though the server still has the comments
Quote ppl you answer.
indeed
As much as I hate to say itOP,v but when somebody ask a question they are asking for their own personal needs. And community is like this are actually here to serve an individuals questions. If that’s not the point of why you’re here then maybe what you should do is start a new thread world whatever it’s called here that’s called spell posted library or something like that so that way you can create a community fact sheet about how to do things. Why somebody delete stuff who knows people are weirdly private about openly public things. Maybe people feel embarrassed about asking your question or move it. It’s who the hell knows. But in the end it is their threat to ask questions and if you choose not to answer a question and then you don’t have to. However your time that you took to answer their question did not get wasted as they chose to take that advice and run with it. Just because your question now has to be read explain or your answer has to be reacclaimed in another thread doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t have to be explained in another thread anyways. You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
Great suggestion. I think you’re both right - until we have such a library as you describe, we should try and keep this as a community resembling one. But a seperate resource actually designed for permanent knowledge hub would be more ideal.
You’re never going to point to this thread or that thread and say the answer was already here the answer was already there. That’s not how communities like this actually work.
This is (presumably) true. I guess another problem with people deleting their stuff is that it’s “bad etiquette” on the poster’s part, as it creates the illusion that less productive exchange is happening on this sub than really is, which then makes visitors less likely to ask for help here. And i guess the OP is hoping that people who need help will do a quick search before posting about their problem.
Okay I’m just gonna call somebody out - Imperious_melange just deleted a thread with over 200 upvotes where a thriving discussion was underway. It was about whether people perceived a pro-China and anti-west sentiment on Lemmy. I tried to post a reply and the site said “deleted by creator”. The thread was just gone. They also seem to have deleted their account, so I can’t even PM them. That’s all just a huge dick move.
It’s a particularly egregious case of “fuck you, got mine”
It wasn’t.
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Forums have been dealing with this for decades. XKCD even made a comic about forum posts going stale.
missed opportunity to post https://xkcd.com/-1/
Not really the same issue. The xkcd is about unsolved or incompletely resolved issues. This Herr is about questions vanishing along with the answers.
Not seen that on Lemmy, but it’s definitely been a problem on reddit for years. Agree with you - the questions and answers (and even the wrong answers) are valuable to anyone else searching for the same issue. “I got my answer, now fuck y’all”
