When ES members leave and delete posts

fechter said:

Craigsj had edited all of his posts and replaced all content, with just a "---" .
He then PM'd me and asked me to remove his account. Since there was no content left in any of his posts, I deleted those too.

I got no explanation, but if somebody asks me to delete their account and there is no content, I will comply.

In the past, I've had people make these kinds of requests when there were intellectual properly issues involved. You can't patent something that is already publicly posted.

Patents are really such a waste of time these days. I have at least 9 of them but they haven't done me any good. Expensive as hell to have a lawyer do them too.

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amberwolf said:

fechter said:

Craigsj had edited all of his posts and replaced all content, with just a "---" .
He then PM'd me and asked me to remove his account. Since there was no content left in any of his posts, I deleted those too.

I got no explanation, but if somebody asks me to delete their account and there is no content, I will comply.

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Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought the whole reason we added Post History feature was because a member named Nuts&Volts went on a similar self-deletion rampage, removing important content he'd contributed to threads, so that if members did this, stuff could be recovered.

Assisting them by removing even the history defeats the point of having that feature.

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Well said Amberwolf. The way the forum is now is like the real world. Once you say something you can not take it back. I agree that when a forum member has a hissy fit and replaces his words with "---". It is a bit inconvenient to go back and view the history. But that's the way that it is.

I was interested in Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells If I remember correctly? Spinningmagnets created the topic [Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells] by spinning off Craigsj's words from another related topic. I remember lots of informative information on [Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells] by Craigsj. Any one on planet earth looking for information on Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells might be looking here. To remove all those technical helpful words by Craigsj was not good.

Perhaps there should be something in the forum rules stating the once you type something it will remain on the internet till the end of time.

Here I complain about Moderators deleting forum content Moderators you really, really, really, need to STOP deleting forum content. Remember what happened to Hillery when she deleted the hard drive in her server and all her emails were lost? For the record Hillery's hired a computer company who used this BleachBit software to delete stuff.

Sorry about all my complaining and I do want to thank all you moderators for doing a difficult job and moderating a wonderful forum.

ownership of our content? What you post on a public forum is not yours to manage. It is the benefit of the community. And that is the main reason edit history is an option. Shared info is public info. And I think that is general knowledge and consensus too.

I think admin was a little quick deleting the user account as we as a community lost valuable information. As to any problems with regards to craigsj's employer, in my mind that is overthinking things. What he shared was not a frame specific secret and patented knowledge, that one company holds IP rights over. It was general good engineering skills, based on his lengthy studies of frames, suspension and frame geometry explained so that even the every man could keep up, or at least keep reading it over and over until it stuck in the brain.

It was very nice of him to share his wisdom, but I think he overreacted by asking it all to be deleted. And maybe the admin did too?

Rather then deleting his account a better approach might have been to edit out all harsh language in the thread and removed that for the public eye? For the sake of the value of shared information a thread derailing like that does not increase information value in a long term perspective, so editing foul language and comebacks would not only served the gunslingers but also any future reader of the thread coming into the forum via search engines or even already establish members that via forum search find the thread.

I hope admin and mods will consider putting in the time to recreate the original thread, and from there editing unnecessary foul language and personal attacks. That would put back the value of the thread, as well as keep the value and increase the value of that thread over time. Remember, search engines are our friends.

I was interested in Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells If I remember correctly? Spinningmagnets created the topic [Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells] by spinning off Craigsj's words from another related topic. I remember lots of informative information on [Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells] by Craigsj. Any one on planet earth looking for information on Resistance soldering bus-strips onto cells might be looking here. To remove all those technical helpful words by Craigsj was not good.

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Check to see if the information you miss is in the test database for new forum software. If that thread was not posted in the same timeframe as the mid motor thread it is a good chance information is still there.

Sorry for the necro-bump, ran across this thread while lurking. Since I caused this, I created an account to reply.

First, fechter's description of events is true. I edited each of my posts then requested my account be deleted. I was told that ES prefers not to delete accounts but that my request would be honored if I insisted. I appreciate that the moderator did right by me even at the cost of the board's interest. Sorry if anyone lost anything they wished had remained. I was unhappy deleting some of the posts, I thought they were worthwhile. It was an all or nothing thing though.

I also appreciate that people valued some of the posts. I didn't remove the content for any IP reason or any complication with an employer. It was not a result of anything in the suspension kinematics thread although that thread was representative of several of my experiences.

Basically, very high profile board members chose to make publicly clear that my views were neither valued nor respected and that I was encouraged to take my contributions elsewhere...so I did. I was told that I was ignorant and had contributed nothing to ES. Under those circumstances, I think most people can understand my preference to not have my posts retained. Among the members was L4P.

Ironically, in the thread in question I had prepared a technical argument before I entered. I'm an EE by education and had expertise on the topic but that discussion never happened because the other members felt pure ad hominem was the right answer. At least RIPPERTON engaged in technical discussion, the others couldn't be bothered.

I had been a lurker for a number of years prior to posting but felt it best that I not participate. Eventually I saw a topic I had invested considerable effort in for which the discussion was incorrect and potentially dangerous. I created an account to contribute there. The short time I was posting I experienced mostly hostility.

ES is a unique resource with a lot of smart people doing interesting things. I continue to read here from time to time but I don't feel it's best to contribute. The account has been created again so PM works.

This thread's topic had me wondering if Craigsj was a citizen of the EU. If so, under the GDPR, he would have the right to request that all of his data be completely deleted. That was before fetcher explained what happened.

Not to go too of topic, but out of curiosity, do the admins have a process for GDPR delete requests?

EDIT: thanks for taking the time to explain things Craigsj

EDIT2: I only just realized the dates in this thread. Ignore me.

Hm seems like a classic case of butt hurt to me. I am sorry you are so easily upset craig. That probably is something you should put some work into to avoid future headache on this or other online communities. There will always be a chance someone react opposite of what we expect when posting online. If request for deletion was honored each and every time some got butt hurt there wouldn't be any successful forums. Sometimes it can be little things that causes odd behavior. Like lost in translation. A bad hair day. Personal problems or even plain stupidness or cruelty. Rise above and keep focused.

I remember the thread, as I was part of it. I was very sad to see your post deleted. I tried everything I could think of to try to collect small fragments and recreate your valued inputs but I was not able to sadly. The thread in question was probably the single one thread here on ES going in depth on the topic.

If you felt your information was correct and worthwhile to read for others, who cares about naysayers? I feel we lost valuable information that would have been so worth while to have posted here. I for one really hope you would reconsider and repost your input.

To be clear, personal attacks are not ok, nor do I support them. But rising above pity mud slinging is the winning formula in cases like that. Let the other part be the vocal one and just continue to post data and information. You know you where right. Fcuk the naysayers.

Hope the experience goes better this time around craigsj. Hopefully you will feel like contributing again someday. Either way, thanks for checking in to clear up the confusion. Keeps us from cooking up some crazy conspiracy theories. Just a warning though. If you ever start dropping suspension tech knowledge again I'll be taking lots of screen shots so you'll have to hack my hard drive if you try to vanish.

zro-1 said:

This thread's topic had me wondering if Craigsj was a citizen of the EU. If so, under the GDPR, he would have the right to request that all of his data be completely deleted. That was before fetcher explained what happened.

Not to go too of topic, but out of curiosity, do the admins have a process for GDPR delete requests?

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Is this true that the forum has to do this? Once something is published, it is out there. Web crawlers have already seen it, internet archivers may already have stored it. Like a printed newspaper, how can that be called back? Does the content "belong" to the individual? Some forums explicitly say they take over "ownership" of material. (I'm not saying I agree with this, just want to understand).

This isn't information that some company has collected about an individual, it is something that the user has themselves published to the world via the forum. It is not quite "personal data".

Check the dates on those posts. This is a really old topic.

Once in a while, somebody posts about a project that is related to a business interest and contains intellectual property that somebody is trying to patent or protect. Once something is posted on the forum, it becomes public record and for patent purposes "prior art" and cannot be patented.

If somebody requests that I remove their posts, I will generally do it unless I see a good reason not to. This does not come up very often. I have no clue about GDPR and whether it would apply to this forum since it's Canadian.

macribs said:

Hm seems like a classic case of butt hurt to me. I am sorry you are so easily upset craig. That probably is something you should put some work into to avoid future headache on this or other online communities.

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I'm not so easily upset, macribs, and I'd further note that it's just this kind of unprovoked personal attack that makes forums unworthy. Considering Ripperton, there's at least some evidence that contradicts your point of view. No one is obligated to take abuse.

Prior to leaving ES I had an ugly exchange with a member on another site. I left there, not after the exchange, but after a PM discussion I had with a moderator where I was told that if I didn't show proper deference to that specific member that I would be banned. Shortly afterward the same member personally attacked me here. I prefer not to be a member of a community that behaves this way and tolerates people like this. Like everyone else, I'm familiar with forums and have even moderated and admin'ed on some. I know how it works.

If you read enough other forums you will also learn that I'm not the only one to abandon ES for this reason, if you don't know that already.

fechter said:

Check the dates on those posts. This is a really old topic.

I have no clue about GDPR and whether it would apply to this forum since it's Canadian.

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Yeah, I noticed the dates of how old this was after I replied. Sorry for continuing to resuscitate an old thread.

As I think about it more, I guess GDPR doesn't necessarily apply to public posts, but I guess it could. It has more to do with "personal information" (not personally identifiable information aka PII as we are more familiar with in the states). It's a bit like CASL on steroids for the Canadian folks. This post does a nice job of summing things up into a bulleted list. If you admins are interested in discussing it further, I was involved with the team that got the company I work for GDPR compliant, so I'm pretty familiar with it and I'd be happy to discuss it further. I'm sure some of our EU members are familiar with it as well.

craigsj said:

. . . . I had an ugly exchange with a member on another site. I left there, not after the exchange, but after a PM discussion I had with a moderator where I was told that if I didn't show proper deference to that specific member that I would be banned. . . . I prefer not to be a member of a community that behaves this way and tolerates people like this.

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I think anyone who has spent much time with online forums has gagged on the behavior here and there, sometimes the bad guys really are in charge. I was once paid to be the poster who took over fighting with the jerks (I'm sure that doesn't surprise many people) so they'd get tired of the forum and leave rather than get banned by a major Hollywood publication that didn't want people talking about getting banned by them. Kind of a fun job at times, when they really do deserve it. So one guy who they couldn't help but be banned started his own board that was popular for awhile, but he wound up banning some huge number of people for disagreeing with him. Sometimes I wanted to tell him I was the moderator who had finally banned him over there, especially after I got fed up with even reading at his site where he didn't dare ban me because I was so popular. Going right on posting during his rages at me, with people forwarding their angry EMails to him and his responses to them over to me. Such entertainment. But even that gets tiring. Still, I treasure the memories of him talking about my incredible slurpee machine that could brain freeze small countries instantly, etc. If you knew all the things he wound up in prison for, well. . . . (I'm not making this up.) I hear they did wind up giving his law license back, though.

I have to say the moderators here really give huge latitude. I started to write "Great Latitude," but some of it doesn't seem so great, at times. At other sites I might get accused of taking advantage of a mental weakling when I let THEM start a battle of wits that I finish. Not here. But even I wonder if it's the best idea to just let them face karmic justice when they start on me. I always feel that because there ARE so many people like Craig who don't want to see this run amok it's better to respond to the fools, but then there ends up being the strings of the posts as discussed here. Not necessarily encouraging to the Craig's of the world seeing it before they've even posted.

Some things in life have no solutions. In fact, many things done to fix it only make it worse.

Oh, the history link after edits is mentioned in this thread. Is that supposed to still work? I don't have anything to click on for it.

AFAIK the entire history of any post edited with that feature was completely lost with teh old version of teh forum. I don't know why all that information wasn't preserved, but I doubt it can be recovered.

craigsj said:

macribs said:

Hm seems like a classic case of butt hurt to me. I am sorry you are so easily upset craig. That probably is something you should put some work into to avoid future headache on this or other online communities.

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I'm not so easily upset, macribs, and I'd further note that it's just this kind of unprovoked personal attack that makes forums unworthy. Considering Ripperton, there's at least some evidence that contradicts your point of view. No one is obligated to take abuse.

Prior to leaving ES I had an ugly exchange with a member on another site. I left there, not after the exchange, but after a PM discussion I had with a moderator where I was told that if I didn't show proper deference to that specific member that I would be banned. Shortly afterward the same member personally attacked me here. I prefer not to be a member of a community that behaves this way and tolerates people like this. Like everyone else, I'm familiar with forums and have even moderated and admin'ed on some. I know how it works.

If you read enough other forums you will also learn that I'm not the only one to abandon ES for this reason, if you don't know that already.

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Hm. OK bad choice of words on my part. For that I am sorry. But a personal attack it was not. If you read my entire post and not the part you quoted you will see I was one of the people that fancied your posts and later on I even wrote that I hope you would reconsider and repost what once got deleted. From the top of my old memory I seem to recall the topic being about geometry, shock placement and how to get best rear suspension work. That is a topic many struggles deeply with, especially people like me that has no engineering background. Reading up on such a vast topic can be daunting at best. Not to mention who is to say the sources we collect books and other written materials from are the ones with the best approach?

When someone post stuff that seems to contradict what other has experienced it could be that it is because they are on to something few people are aware of, and from other areas in life I've come to learn that in such situations it is best to listen and pay attention when that occurs.

Even if some of the posts I read in the thread was nasty and more then what is ok, try to see the big picture. You challenged what they know. Rather then trying to take in your posts and reflect over what you said I think they chose the defensive line and that ended up escalating into personal attacks. I don't have photographic memories but I can say that what you experienced is not how this forum is most of the time for most of the users. Sure there are bad remarks and mudslinging sometimes, but there is an option in forum software to "foe" such people and automatically block all their posts.

At least one thing I can assure you, ES forum is not all assholes all the time. Give it a second chance, take steps if you feel some is acting out and block their bs right away. Then keep contributing to the benefit of the wide e-bike community with less noise and a more positive feel for you and a better user experience this time.

Again sorry for the sloppy remark.

amberwolf said:

AFAIK the entire history of any post edited with that feature was completely lost with teh old version of teh forum. I don't know why all that information wasn't preserved, but I doubt it can be recovered.

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I know I was looking for that a week or so ago. Used to be able to see the different edited posts on a link right below every post if it was edited. I thought it was perhaps just a feature I turned off somewhere, so I went to go halfass looking for it and couldnt find it no more. I tend to delete posts that I have posted because I have found the info I needed, or it was just a dumb question, or it was a question I posted too quickly without searching.

Now I know to make a post quoting whatever info I deem valuable in another post. That will preserve the info in the event that this happens again won't it?

Yes.

The old posts are probably still in the database, but looking at them is not easy unless a plug-in is installed to manage it.

It's a monster pain in the ass.
There's no plugin.
There's no function in phpbb.
It's about a hundred lines of code job, involving some reverse engineering of phpbb.. but the real problem is testing the code because you're dealing with two 7gb datasets..

Not the most fun way to spend a weekend. I'm not volunteering :lol:

There used to be a plugin (or whatever it's called), in the previous version. I'm assuming the old version won't work on the new PHPBB version...and that's what would take the reverse-engineering?

What about asking the writer of the original plugin?

I dont' know which one was used before, but a quick search found this one
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=456&t=2354286
but it is marked as abandoned. :/ It's writer is here
https://www.phpbb.com/community/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=1366717

and this one
https://tracker.phpbb.com/browse/PHPBB3-10755
but I can't access anything on the page (it appears to require scripts or something that won't run on my browsers)

fechter said:

Patents are really such a waste of time these days. I have at least 9 of them but they haven't done me any good. Expensive as hell to have a lawyer do them too.

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Hehe... Seen in ES Newz:

It was patented but the Baron spent the next few years fruitlessly trying to collect royalties as others simply took his ideas and launched a craze for these "draisines".

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Here:
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1125

... pretty sure from the daze before the World Wide Wait. :wink:

Thanks for looking into that, AW.
Plugins that no longer work.. a recurring theme when it comes to 3.2.x!