Say Bob321 wanted to delete (or anonymized) all his posts. He would have to give a reason, then K5ers would vote on it. Maybe 3 options; "yes", "no", "find another resolution".
If "find another..." got the most votes, then perhaps Bob321 would just request certain posts, and they would be voted on etc etc.

Look, if some douche decides for some reason that he wants his diary taken down, who cares? Let him.  What the hell do you care? Google may have already cached it anyway.  Either way, diaries are not the meat of K5, and should be flexible.  

Everything else should stay.  I don't even think you should be able to take your name off a story! Rusty should make the "delete me" button delete the account and all its info, but all comments and stories retain the username, just un-hyperlinked.

As many people already seem to be, I'm also of the opinion that if you're going to post something then you should be careful of what you say. If you say something stupid, then too bad. Honestly, a community like this would really benefit if people could just learn to apologise and admit mistakes instead of trying to hide them as if they didn't happen.

I know at least one person who's very flambouyant about things he says online, and he's just as quick to try to rearrange history once he realises he's said something stupid or insulting so he can pretend it didn't happen, even though it's already affected everyone else. As far as everyone else is concerned, he's all the evidence that they have to justify being annoyed at him, and it's frustrating as hell.

More recently he's struck some situations where he can't as easily delete history, and ended up digging himself into a hole. He hasn't liked it, but he's also been forced to learn to be more careful about what he says around and about other people. Watching him squirm is great.

There may be a few exceptions along the lines of someone posting private or personal information about someone else where it's generally agreed that it shouldn't be posted. If anything is deleted, there should still be a record that it was there, as well as who deleted it and the reason why it was deleted. (Preferably written by a trusted third person.) But hopefully that's not common enough that people need to be given control of removing their own comments.

In general if someone's dumb enough to say something they regret, then don't let them pretend it never happened. If necessary put a disclaimer up reminding people that they won't be able to delete things. Most people say something silly now and then, but that's what apologies and retractions are for. It's not that bad to admit being wrong, and if it's not representative then it'll show through in other correspondence.

- izogi

On the other hand, I don't like the idea that every stupid thing everyone ever said should be held forever for posterity, and I'm pretty uncomfortable being the guy who ultimately decides that that's how it shall be.

Oh, oh, I know! Let's go back to the library and rewrite the Cat in the Hat to include a Pepsi ad, so that it will match the movie! That will make Pepsi happy! Let's go to the microfiche archives and cut out all the run away slave bounties, then it'll be like slavery never existed! Let's burn all the archives from 1942 entirely, because the holocaust makes us sad!

Ask yourself: Would you want everything that you had ever said, even when drunk, tired, angry or depressed on permanent record for all the world to see at any time, anonymously, without you ever having the possibility of knowing that someone had accessed it?

Deletion should be only be for unusual cases, but that doesn't mean that users, especially those whose use real names, traceable (ie not just Hotmail...) e-mail addresses and so on, should be forced to have potentially compromising information displayed forever, especially if it was not clear at the time what significance posting that information could have. Would you want a potential future employer to read through all the K5 archives? What happens if you ever go to court - careless comments can and would be used against you, often taken out of context and perhaps without direct relevance to the matter at hand. Remember that a K5 user was visited by the US secret service for a comment on Kuro5hin. The fact that you did not mean something seriously does not stop someone from misinterpreting it; with or without malicious intent. Remember there is not always a way for law enforcement officers or HR personnel to know whether a comment is a joke or not and that such individuals may well decide to err on the side of caution.

For those reasons I suggest the following model:

While it was originally developed to serve a noble purpose -- to retract ill-considered statements -- in actual practice, it's most often used in a petulant manner. People get torqued off about someone or something, have an attack of I'm-taking-my-ball-and-going-home, and perform a mass-scribble of their comments. The result is a highly-disrupted and disjoint conference topic, which ends up annoying everyone else.

When considering this idea, I think it's important to remember two things:

1. When participating in a conversation, you are not the sole participant. Other people are crucially involved in the process of constructing a train of thought. If you yank out your pieces, the whole thing falls apart, and everyone who helped to build it is affected, not just you.
2. Scribbling/comment deletion is permanent. If you post in a fit of pique, you can either scribble it, or write a new post apologizing for/clarifying your previous post. OTOH, if you scribble in a fit of pique, that's it. It's gone, and you can't get it back.

I've seen the effects of mass-scribbles first-hand and, as such, I think it's an idea you want to avoid.

As a normal thing, deletion is bad. But I can see situations where the things posted might cause embarrassment or trouble in offline life. Having to go with an all-or-nothing "nuke me" button would both allow quick cleanup and prevent people using deletion as an obnoxious rhetorical device.

The "Nuke Me" button, I think, should be protected by immediate password and an "are you sure?" page. Not sure about email verification - in the circumstances where it would be needed, email might be a problem. The result that I would advocate is that the user's profile is deleted, and all diaries and messages are replaced with "deleted by author" and all stories annonymized.

I can see where it might be abused - people might set up throwaway accounts - but I doubt it would be much fun since all one could leave behind is a bunch of "this message deleted by author" husks. The only real abuse I see as likely is people using it to stomp off in a huff.

Having said that, I think everyone realizes that a word written is potentialy permanent no matter what. It exists in caches all over the place, and could well have been saved by any number of people. I made a sarcastic offhand comment on a mailing list a few years back, somebody stripped the context, and it's been popping up on lists of inspirational quotes.

Allowing users to delete everything they ever posted is going to effectively destroy this site.

Why?

Because every time some "I live behind my computer" whiny loser gets a little pissed off about things not going their way (about whatever) they're going to use their new power of deletion to force the issue.

Unfortunatley, a lot of the big time users here (espscially the diary whores) are spoiled little brats. However unfortunate, the community is built on them as a core.

We lost a lot during this last migration of diary whores, and K5 is worse for it. We probably can't bring them back, but allowing them, as well as the next batch to come back and delete stories, diaries, and comment threads is ridiculous.

possibly replacing user-defined words with similarly anonymous tags ( in the content of the comments/stories).

you would have to limit the number of words and do some heuristic to prevent someone from listing all words (effectively deleting their whole comment). or just human review (eg, making sure only names are listed).

google search for "webwench's diary"

Who knows what could get socked away at http://www.archive.org/.

I guess though, that is (probably) a short term concern, and most likely people should be allowed to take their words back if they want. As long as the author retains copyright perhaps the issue could even be forced?

take care,

1. There must be placeholders, anonymous or not. Otherwise threads could get very bizarre.
2. In no case can one user's choice to delete their stories/comments/diaries delete someone else's writing. I.e. diary deletion should leave other user's comments in place. If I post in a diary, I own my own comments, even if the diary is owned by someone else. A user who is deleting their stuff should have to ask others to delete (individual) comments that they think need to be deleted to remove all the embarassing/dangerous/etc. information about them. Or at least the comments by other users should remain visible to the author, but no one else.

But it's normal that is happens, and hiding it won't prevent it from happening, quite the opposite. People will feel it's less likely to be reprimanded for saying stupid things, and thus will just say more such.

Keeping it for all to see, however, will cost a few people a bit more than they feel like (who knows who'll read what you posted on K5? Maybe your possible (now impossible) future boss will and will send you to hell because of it) -- but in the end, they'll learn not to do it again.

It's a basic question of responsability -- live up to what you did/said. Including the stupid parts.

----

Once that's said and done, always keep the possibility of human intervention. Maybe somebody's gonna post something here that could lead him/her into trouble with tyrannic governments? Maybe somebody's speech (hate speech, life threats, whatever) MUST be censored.

My personal opinion is that the decision should still be made on a case by case basis by a human, but there should be some objective criteria by which that decision is to be made, and every such decision should be publically listed somewhere (maybe as a rusty or CaptainTenille diary entry - or even a special DELETINGUSERS account diary entry) along with discussion of why this particular case meets the criteria. Perhaps there should even be some time for discussion in the diary before the deletion actually takes effect.

I'm giving no opinion on what the objective criteria should be. I suggest you try to formulate a list of objective criteria which cover the way in which you made your previous decisions, and then post that list for discussion along with voting (btw, using plurality voting for making any actual decision with more than two answers is a heinous crime - please do some research on election methods before having another vote ;) )

if you say something stupid, live up to it

if you say something stupid and later want to retract it, that says something about your character

god knows, i've made a complete fool of myself here, such as butting heads reptitively with complete trolls, and a few days later, looking over the shamefully stupid kindergarten-level thread, i felt like i just woke up sober the next day after a night of drunken sex and realized the chick snoring next to me is a gap-toothed horse-head beer-goggle wonder... AAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!

but you know what? i did it, i'm not going to try to erase it, i have to own up to what i said

I feel a bit bad about jjayson because he actually did contribute, but if he wants to be deleted then it's not the end of the world.

It's not balanced to have a poll which includes nine different deletion options and one 'do not delete' option. This is just melding two separate questions into one and it drastically affects the result.

The first question is "Should users have the facility for deleting their contribution history upon the close of an account?". This requires a simple yes / no answer. If the majority choose 'yes', then it's fair to go into all the possible options.

Doing what you're doing, the 'yes' votes are split across numerous options while the 'no' votes are concentrated on just one. It's perfectly designed at present to result in an overwhelming 'No' majority, which is incidentally the option I'm leaning towards, so I don't consider it a problem, but others may well complain (and be justified in doing so).

Also, if you add the facility to delete comments, it may well lead to the practise of people 'whole quoting' other posts so as to make their comments not seem ridiculous should the seed post be deleted. This in turn could lead to a mailing list type of paradigm - with excessive quoting being rampant (and accompanying arguments as to the correct way to quote). Thought that eventuality should be considered, however unlikely...

The fact is, when you delete shit you've made, it impacts every other person who commented on that, referred to it, talked about it, etc. If you think you're going to regret doing something, either don't fucking do it, or do it and have enough balls to live with the consequences. This deletion idea is something that could tear apart the integrity of huges amounts of the site, leading to archives and old stories being practically useless thanks to the mangled shit deletion would leave behind. I honestly cannot understand the motivations of anyone who would support such an idiotic idea.

And goddamnit, if people can "delete" shit (which I honestly hope is never allowed to happen), that account should DIE and DIE FOREVER. If you're still posting here, live with the fucking history you've created for yourself.

• Tell my creditors I was only kidding.
• Return my kids.
• ...and take back all the sex I ever had with my ex.
• Erase everything I ever said to any love interest I've ever had.
• Unbuy the 486 66Mz PC with a VESA bus motherboard I got in 1995.
• Get all those tunes out of my head that I downloaded for free off the 'Net.
• Completely uninstall Mozilla -- and AOL.
• Cleanly upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000.
• Be unbaptized.
• Drop my cable subscription -- oh wait, I can do that.

on what you want K5 to be - if it is trying to be collaborative media, then the comments on a story should not be deleted - since this is what makes an article "collaborative". Take away(or edit), comments and you confuse what is often the best part of an article.

Unfortunately, the media here is rarely collaborative. If you want just another discussion site - basically a web based news group which is mostly what we get here, lately at least, Then delete away - and you become blogspot

Actually, I would like to see more colaborative tools instead, If users could form groups that could edit stories together. Also, I would like to see IP checking on the ratings, so that no two story or comment ratings could come from the same IP

Kuro5hin can be a place where everyone is anonymous and hidden, too afraid to post any personal details for fear of it later being held against them. Or it can be a place where people can discuss real things that genuinely matter to them like they would amongst mates at the local pub.

In real life casual discussions, people don't tape or otherwise record the things that you say. So your RL "comments" are stored in a rather volatile medium - human memory. Human memory is not very precise and it doesn't last long for mundane things like comments.

The main point I want to make is that there should be a time limit. It's no good allowing people to delete things they said yesterday. That will lead to even more abuse. But it's no good keeping things in perpetuity. Decide on a certain time frame (I like 6 months) and then allow people to delete their comments and diaries that are more than 6 months old. In fact I'd like to be able to check an option on my account to say that everything I wrote would be deleted after 6 months. Automatically.

I don't see why preserving month-old discussions is important. How many people trawl the archives reading diaries from months or years ago? Stories are more important to protect than diaries, but even then, most of the "meat" is in the story body, not the discussions. If the comment had any value, it is the right of the comment writer to retract it.

And if somebody says something stupid, 6 months should be more than enough time for them to suffer the deserved amount of ignominy.

In terms of removing content if someone thinks what they have posted could impact them adversly then I would side with the user, though I would think the user should at least give fair reason as to why they need (rather than want) it removed. Placeholders sounds like a fair enough compromise to not loosing other peoples input (though obviously out of context replys wont always make any sense!)

K5 really is not all that secure with how it manages user logins and passwords. Yes, you can specify a login over https and that protects your password, but after that the site does everything it can with hyperlinks to get you back over to http. At that point, your authentication cookie is broadcast in the clear. This allows for user impersonation.

All in all, hijacking someone's account isn't that interesting, as the most you can do is post some bogus stuff which could ostensibly be deleted at a later point when the legit user caught on and notified a site admin. What happens, though, if an attacker hijacks an account and then issues a command to purge all data from the user's account? This could cause serious problems both from an administrative and computational perspective.

First of all, the delete operation on the database is apt to be expensive on the database, as it has to go and whack a whole bunch of data. An admin could undo a wrongful deletion, but that too would be a lot of work, and it could easily just happen again.

The whole system is only as secure as the connection between your computer and K5 is secure from malicious users rewriting packets. Depending on your setup, this may or may not be a reasonable assumption.

• Administrator approved removal of stories that "get someone in shit", such exceptions must be made regardless of what the general policy
• At will, and at random deletion of comments/diaries/posts however, will reduce the quality of debate. As such, I suggest this system:

Now, first off, this isn't so. Part of becoming a member of this site, as Rusty mentioned, is accepting that your comments are there for everyone to read as long as the site exists.

Another way to look at it is by comparing it to reality. In real life there's no way to take back what you've said. No matter what you do you can't go back in time and remove that comment. If this site is to be a reflection of reality (however slim of one that may be), then we should obviously try to emulate reality as much as possible.

No deletion.

"No deletion allowed. Ever."

The main legit reason I see for deletion is that you inadvertently posted something which may or may not come back to haunt you. Renaming the disabled account should solve a lot of those issues (and allow you to retain that username on, say, IRC or on other sites).

I would think that it might also be prudent to allow, if a user selects this, to offer the option of going through all the user's comments and diaries (not stories) and doing an s/$OLD_USERNAME/[TEXT EXPUNGED]/g. It might also be reasonable to allow, on a case by case basis expunging of other identifying information (by identifying, I mean something that actually states one's meatspace name).

personally, i feel that you made a conscience choice at the time to throw your idea/opinion/propaganda into the public domain by hitting post. therefore, i am completely against people being able to delete comments and the like. that will cause holes in in the discussion and, if done enough, will cause discussions to become nonsensical. so i vote that stories and comments must stay as they were posted.

i do think that we should have full control over a diary. i couldve gotten mad at my boss, ranted about it, then realised i didnt want it on my diary's section. just as a pen and paper diary, i can throw it away, or tear pages out, so i vote for full user control over ones diaries.

i do like the idea that upon closing of your account, all your stories and comments will be renamed to something non identifying. if "no deletion" is not a possibility, then the second best option would be to delete the account and erase all identifying marks.

so i vote, full user control of diaries, no deletion of stories or comments, but im willing to compromise and say you can have your username erased from all stories and comments posted by you, but the story or comment must stay so that the discussions make sense.

-- j0sh

Stuff will not disappear for 3 days, account can be resumed within that time.
After that the placeholders are inserted, and the account password is randomized.

The account is kept as normal and deleted whenever inactive accounts are normally deleted.

This way, hissy fits have a chance to come back and the trolls can't post short-term comments for the express purpose of making people rage at something stupid, then removing the stupid bit.

Basically, a way to allow there to be some consequences to actions while still allowing people to get rid of their stuff when they're going.

_{That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze}

Name switching doesn't work for the same reason, since people replying to foobar will often say 'foobar, you're a moron' even though the name is now Peanut_butter9837.

Full deletion raises the spectre of threads making no sense, but again, any replies or other diaries by other people allow one to glean information.

Regular users just take things one thread at a time. Once the discussion is over, that's the last they think of the comments. Most people can't get into that insular circlejerk that is the diary section and so never post any compromising tidbit they feel the burning desire to remove.

This sort of behavior is really at the bottom of what's wrong with this site now. You have a sizable contingent of mouthbreathers infesting the site with their bickering. They use the diary section as a surrogate social outlet. It is enough to make any well-adjusted person ill, which is precisely what drives regular users away. It is also the real root of the crapflooding problem.

Rather than take measures to accomidate your net.kook population, I recommend eliminating the diary section or at least doing something to make it much less prominent. I think you'll find that after doing so, many of these issues will simply disappear.

Also, isn't it about time you closed registration? I think everyone already has their ten accounts and there aren't a lot of newcomers.

I think that removing the idea that what is being said is for posterity will downgrade the signal to noise ratio and the quality of the community. The people we want to participate will be a bit more careful about what they post when they know that it is forever. The people we don't want, won't care either way(they're probably posting from a throway account anyway); they are here to be destructive. Even some of the trolls slowly become constructive to the community after a while, and that progression is important to be able to see.

The final reason is that I remember when this came up at The Well, and it upset a LOT of people. A major contributor leaving can leave a gaping hole in the site.

It's a hard decision Rusty, and I hope you make the right one.

Removing comments is definitely taboo, aince that interrupts the chain in a thread and leaves no context.

A better option for when a user leaves would be:

Then again, I have the same feelings about this site sans a good search - it's very aggravating to try and find an old story or diary I wish to read again, as, apart from the difficulty of just remembering who or what was said (enough to use in a valid search, at least), the search is either broken or a cheap facsimile.  Ultimately, this site has no point without a feasible search function, and would have little to no point if stories/comments/diaries were deleted on the whim of a user.

I don't like the idea of reminding someone of every little stupid thing they've ever said, and there are certain situations (legal or stalker issues, perhaps) where deletion would make sense.  But to delete it just because they felt like having their words deleted?  Please.  jjayson's request is childish, in that he got mad at the admins and does not want them to 'benefit' from his past actions any longer.  Grow the fuck up.  If you are worried about people misconstruing your stories as continued support for the site, then write a diary or submit a story saying why you no longer support the site and that any past submissions should be read in that context.

I vote for allowing users to delete their comments and diaries, I agree that stories are basically everyone's and should not be deleted. Plus it's rare for a story to have text a user might want to delete later. Placeholders are unnecessary for diaries. I know that if there is a link to the diary it gets broken but otherwise diaries are top-level and deleting them doesn't break the flow of anything.

I think making deletion too easy or convenient (i.e. a 'delete everything I ever posted' button) is dangerous, not because i think legitimate users will abuse it, but because it's another tool trolls can use to crapflood with really horrific things, then delete what they've flooded after the damage is done, but before whatever they post can be countered. What I imagine happening is posted diaries from dupe accounts that post users' personal information, or post accusations against someone, in a public place in the forum, then being able to delete what they've posted before it can be refuted or otherwise addressed. Maybe this is overly pessimistic of me. In theory, I like the idea of direct user control; in practice, on this site, I think it's unwise.