Investigating a problem, help appreciated

[Annie]

I'd go a step beyond this suggestion and ask that posts not be deleted, just because users are inactive (or even passed away). I find this forum useful for the quality of the posts, and currently inactive users have written useful posts!

I don’t think anyone would ever intend to delete old posts. It would violate our whole history both here & the old place. I’ve been around coming up on 15 years (omg how did I get this old) and I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve done a google search on some question I had and the result the popped up was my own post or log

So this glitch was definitely something besides trying to delete old content or unused accounts. I’m always so grateful for the seriousness that these matters are approached with — it’s part of what has allowed the community to be such a valuable place for so long.

[Dragon27]

15 years (omg how did I get this old)

That's funny, I have a random comment that I left under some Youtube video 15 years ago, and today somebody wrote under it that I wrote that comment before they were even born

[golyplot]

I don’t think anyone would ever intend to delete old posts. It would violate our whole history both here & the old place.

This isn't the first time that people's accounts have been deleted, including all their old posts. For example, back in 2020, there was a person named Lotus here who commented a lot on my log. However, at some point their account and all their posts were deleted (you can still see some of them quoted in replies by other people).

So clearly there are some circumstances where they do intentionally delete people's old posts here.

[Annie]

So clearly there are some circumstances where they do intentionally delete people's old posts here.

I think there’s a logical gap in what you’re trying to say here. The fact that posts have been deleted doesn’t imply cause or intention.

I don’t know. I’m not trying to stir up drama. If you have an issue with how something was handled, I’m sure it can be addressed, or may already have been 4 years ago. Handling diverse personalities and cultures is not easy and we may not always agree with every decision that gets made by admin. From a technical standpoint, EMK is far more skilled than we have any business having here doing this for us and he’s just a great person overall.

[TimButterfield]

I am not sure there is/was intention to delete all posts either. But, I also know it can be easy to have unintended ripple effects of actions that may not have been anticipated. Accidents happen. It may just be a need to be more aware of the scope of any actions taken as they may be more broad than expected.

It's a technology learning curve. Having backups is always helpful. And, even better, have a separate 'test' environment to experiment in before making changes to a production environment. That way, you may be able to verify the result of actions before losing data unexpectedly.