All right. On deleted posts, I prefer the "silent way" as exposed by Joel Sposky on http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html
It works great and all the page is a worth read ;) [....]
Q. Why do posts disappear sometimes?
A. The forum is moderated. That means that a few people have the magick powah to delete a post. If the post they delete is the first one in a thread, the thread itself appears deleted because there's no way to get to it.
Q. But that's censorship!
A. No, it's picking up the garbage in the park. If we didn't do it, the signal to noise ratio would change dramatically for the worse. People post spam and get rich schemes, people post antisemitic comments about me, people post nonsense that doesn't make any sense. Some idealistic youngsters may imagine a totally uncensored world as one in which the free exchange of intelligent ideas raises everyone's IQ, an idealized Oxford Debate Society or Speakers' Corner. I am pragmatic and understand that a totally uncensored world just looks like your inbox: 80% spam, advertising, and fraud, rapidly driving away the few interesting people. [...]
On 10/30/06, Giovanni Corriga giovanni@corriga.net wrote:
Il giorno dom, 29/10/2006 alle 22.17 -0500, Ron Teitelbaum ha scritto:
All,
I've deleted a news item I posted because it was inaccurate.
I'm sorry for posting the item and my bad attempt at humor.
There's no problem, we're not the NY Times. But anyway, I propose these guidelines for editing/deleting posts:
- if you've just published the post and need to edit or delete it, just
do it: the probability of anyone having alread read the post is so low there's no need to worry about that.
- if after an hour or more you need to edit the post, edit it and add a
notice at the end of the post (with the editing date in case it's different from publishing date).
- if after an hour or more you need to delete a post, delete its content
and place a deletion notice instead. ("The post was deleted because it contained erroneous facts etc. etc.")
Any comments?
Giovanni
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