Moderator requests deletion of 7000 posts

[truthingtotruth]

No personal information or voluntary disclosures that have a justifiable reason to be rescinded after their initial submission? No further action necessary.
Otherwise, limit removals to specific examples or since user is no longer mod maybe assign a staffer to evaluate her post history and cherrypick deletions on her behalf.

If its anonymization of old activity thats sought, user could use a new identity and abandon the old one or the opposite in either form (ie keep the identity but reassign all old posts to another/guest account, or preferably reassign old posts in separate batches to multiple accounts specifically assigned to dilute the original authorship of posts and make it hard to identify the original account that posted them if the recipient accounts' ip adresses are cleared).

My goodness, a very professional post/answer. But something jumps out in that first question --- "justifiable reason" could be very different for the person doing the assessing of what's justifiable.

Maybe the team should chose a panel of three they super trust and let them answer a "justifiable reason" request for assessment and then do that staffer work idea, except that poor staffer better be receiving lots of chocolate cookies and coffee for that much work.

By the way, a management question that might fit here:

How do you breakdown your mod threads? I mean, do you shut down and archive by like a timestamp of one year? You know, like one active mod forum for each year? Or would that be asking for secret intel on SOP here? If so, forget the question and I apologize. Sort of curious, I guess.

 

[zappaDPJ]

How do you breakdown your mod threads? I mean, do you shut down and archive by like a timestamp of one year? You know, like one active mod forum for each year?

This is a bit of a generalization because I run more than one forum but I don't recall ever archiving a moderator thread. They do occasionally get referred back to, even some of the older threads which is why I leave them active plus they provide a repository of decision making which helps keep things fair and consistent.

 

[truthingtotruth]

Excuse me, but my thinking wasn't related to archiving just one thread, which I know could lead to problems.

I was asking about the entire mod forum being archived and then a new one started. Split by time, maybe. Or other parameter, if it is a super busy forum.

Like now there would be a Mod-Forum-2022 and Mod-Forum-2021 is archived.

Too weird? Very unnecessary? Just wondering, if I may. I haven't done that sort of level of forum admin work for many years, so I could be walking on a going nowhere path and have my head stuck up my --- on that sort of thinking.

But that number of 7,000 for just one Mod Community Member sure strikes me as some folks are really busy back there.

 

[FTL]

Crikey, this question has really sparked some debate! I've already said my tuppence worth on here so I won't wade in now, but there's an interesting mix of opinions in this thread.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Excuse me, but my thinking wasn't related to archiving just one thread, which I know could lead to problems.

I was asking about the entire mod forum being archived and then a new one started. Split by time, maybe. Or other parameter, if it is a super busy forum.

I understand that, I think we are talking at cross-purposes I mean I haven't archived any threads and I have one forum where a single member of staff has made 66,109 posts in the moderator section alone. Imagine getting a deletion request on that lot!

 

[truthingtotruth]

I don't know where my communications skills have failed, but maybe I can ask in a different way: Is your Moderator Forum, where this thread is about; is it presently a single forum from day one when it was first started?

And thank you for being patient with my constant questions, even if they seem to overlap, which I apologize for. I'm juggling way too much in a finite brain these days.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Is your Moderator Forum, where this thread is about; is it presently a single forum from day one when it was first started?

It is one forum, started 16 years ago.

 

[truthingtotruth]

Thank you, and the vocabulary "monster" jumped out of my brain right after I was thanking you in my head. I mean the forum must be a monster, not you.

I did see that 69 thousand something up there, too. Are you really just a human, zappaDPJ? How in the heck can you handle that? You are in the wrong job. You should run for some country's top job if you can do that type of work.

 

[LeadCrow]

I did see that 69 thousand something up there, too. Are you really just a human, zappaDPJ? How in the heck can you handle that?

In practice there would be no need for that. No obligation, and a forum webmaster can cite technical difficutlties to executing legislation that was drafted for social networks where all your content is strictly sectioned off with unique non-sequential identifiers and easy to delete (almost forums still use sequential identifiers for everything so the issues this causes cannot be remedied, especially with spam, memberlist cleanup, site merges, sharing that cannot be restricted with revocable keys...).

Back to the above. If the internal posts you dont have staff-level access to are dissociated from your account, theyre undistinguishably believed to be deleted. The most common way to do that would be to reassign authorship of that user's internal posts to another account then anonymize it (preferably in batches together with other anonymization candidates so as to dilute original authorship when you clear those posts' ip adresses).

Do keep in mind the oldest posts need to remain associated to the original user in cases where 'sort of deletion' isnt motivated by removal of personal information or unvoluntary disclosures regretted after the fact, and that otherwise a trusted staffer or more would need to consider select removals.

 

[DigNap15]

Tell you mod they were stupid enough to disclose their personal details on a forum
Its their fault
Tough luck!

 

[Mesca]

When I am asked for this, I say :
1/ As per GDPR I will delete your post containing personal information. As I can not know what is personal information in your posts please give me a list :
- with the link of the topic (ideally to the post)
- date and hour of the post
- what part is personal ?
I will either delete or edit your message so that you don't have problem in your real life.

Please note if your message has been quoted, you have to give me the same information for the posts quoting your post.

2/ As I won't be able to easily find your posts once your account is deleted, I will wait your list or your confirmation that there is no personal information posted on your account before deleting it.

3/ I can not delete all your messages, because it will leave holes in conversation, some generic information you posted will be of use to other people and I can not delete your threads because other users took time to answer you and gave much information on these topics. But I will gladly delete all information that can impact on your life if you give me the list.

[1. As the user will have to do a list, it will limit the amount of post he requires you to delete
2. Sometimes they want to delete their account first
3. I explain them why I can not delete all at once]

 

[Mesca]

Tell you mod they were stupid enough to disclose their personal details on a forum
Its their fault
Tough luck!

There is a right to be forgotten in the GDPR (droit à l'oubli).
And there are many specific times you don't realise you are sharing personal information and it can be a problem :
- you are under 18 when you write for example
- this is a restricted area with people you know, but it ends to be a non so restricted area with people you don't know
- you made a mistake, and you have a right to be forgotten several years later.

Legally you can't refuse. Even if « Nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans »

 

[Mesca]

Excuse me, but my thinking wasn't related to archiving just one thread, which I know could lead to problems.

I was asking about the entire mod forum being archived and then a new one started. Split by time, maybe. Or other parameter, if it is a super busy forum.

Like now there would be a Mod-Forum-2022 and Mod-Forum-2021 is archived.

Too weird? Very unnecessary? Just wondering, if I may. I haven't done that sort of level of forum admin work for many years, so I could be walking on a going nowhere path and have my head stuck up my --- on that sort of thinking.

But that number of 7,000 for just one Mod Community Member sure strikes me as some folks are really busy back there.

On the forum I manage, we did this when the forum was bought.
Because some moderators were against the buyer and did say some things that were very embarrassing for them.
So we archived all the old forums, keeping access only to old moderators so that they could discuss between them.
And we started a new moderator section, copy pasting all important information from the old one.

 

[Jeremy8]

Wikipedia doesn't remove edit history from specific users who wish to be "forgotten." I don't believe GDPR means that European forums must delete every single post a user makes, but I'm not a lawyer.

 

[Pete]

Wikipedia doesn't remove edit history from specific users who wish to be "forgotten." I don't believe GDPR means that European forums must delete every single post a user makes, but I'm not a lawyer.

Nope, it doesn’t. It is quite specific to “personal information” and even makes passing nods at collaborative works such as a forum thread.

 

[Reverse Groove]

What forum software are you using. Most i would assume would have a Prune option were it disappears the post / threads made by the poster in question but will still counts towards the site stat's.

Or just create a sub forum that is not viewable to other user groups etc admin and just move all the post's etc to that sub forum.

But because it might ruin current topics etc maybe move only content that is say 12months old and then use the word/spam filter to filter out words that have IRL information of said poster.

Personally i would just de-activate her account manually through the DB and rename it to a Random username like Guest etc then prune her content that is 12months old and then use word/Spam filter to auto change anything that has her IRL info in public viewable topics.

Then in the future if other posters want content deleted you can manually through the DB attach it to the Guest id and just edit out anything that may have IRL info via the word/spam filter.

This is practically what I've done on Forums I've been the dev & admin for in the past. If a user decides they want they're posted content removed out of spite etc.
I would just manually though the DB attach it to the Ex-Member account that was not usable and if they didn't have to many post's would prune x month old post's and the rest would just get edited via the word/spam filter.

If it was a somewhat old but useful post like a Tutorial or Sticky it would just get reposted with credit given at the end of the post given to the Ex Member.

 

[Gerry]

You can make him, if he also wants to delete his account his username unrecognizable and censor the posts that contain private details, unfortunately this is very time consuming with over 7000 posts.

 

[AdamD]

Couldn't a MySQL query be run on the post table to search for specific keywords and userid, then replace the matches with asterisks?

(that sounded better in my head I might add)

 

[Pete]

Potentially but I give you the clbuttic mistake problem...

 

[rhianna]

Update: the moderator accepted no other action than what she suggested which was a total deletion of all her posts in the moderator section. All other actions I suggested were rejected, including an offer that she, I and the other moderator share the burden of reading through the 7000 posts and checking them for personal information. So she left in a flurry after having told me what a terrible person I am.