Occasionally people for various reasons wish to remove content they have posted here, and/or leave the forum entirely.
When this occurs for a reason that is stressful, I tend to get contacted by people asking me to urgently do something about it. I then have to have a detailed conversation with them to figure out what is happening and what they are actually requesting, before I can then decide how to sort it out. Unfortunately often in such situations their need is urgent, or they are emotionally upset, and a long conversation is not what they were wanting to have.
In this post I want to outline a clear policy around removing content from the forum, to make it clearer and easier for everybody. The situation is very different for removal of personal information, and leaving the forum entirely, so I will address both separately.
From the perspective of the ministry, the past discussions on this forum are an invaluable teaching resource. Most of us spent many hours reading old discussions before signing up. We try to preserve old discussions as much as possible to retain their teaching value, and are reluctant to delete comments from them as this has the potential to make the conversation confusing and unreadable - or even remove one viewpoint entirely and leave it one-sided. When people were the minority view in a conversation their posts can be essential to retain balance and ensure future readers are not steered towards the opposite viewpoint. And when people are in difficult personal situations, their posts can be some of the most valuable contributions which others can learn from - even a disastrous situation can be invaluable, even if only as a warning. If a situation is something others could learn from, we would prefer to anonymise the details (names, location etc) and leave it visible than to delete it.
This policy simply puts in writing the way I have been balancing these competing interests for a number of years. It explains what you can do yourself, and when and how to ask for assistance.
Help, I shared personal information and I need it gone!
Specific posts:
Other content
You may have also posted content in these places, which you should be able to edit or delete yourself. Hover over your username (top right of the page) to view these:
General privacy
You can take a range of measures to determine who can view your profile page, and who can contact you privately. Check out your "Privacy" settings.
Private conversations
You can delete conversations from your own inbox, but just like with emails the other participants will still retain copies unless they choose to delete them also. Forum staff have no access to private conversations.
Chat
Chat messages are very temporary, and disappear after a few hours or when the chatroom is closed. But you can also hover over a message and click the red X to delete it immediately.
Username (e.g. you used your real name, but need to hide your identity):
Leaving the forum
If you no longer wish to participate on the forum, the simplest option is to just log out and not return. There is no need for the moderators or administrator to do anything.
However, if you wish to disappear more thoroughly from the site and not be contacted in future, you may wish to first make a few small changes to your privacy and email notification settings. You may optionally:
Do not ask the staff to delete your account. We will not usually delete an account, because on the public forum all this does is to change the username to "Guest" and leave all the content up anyway, it does little of value. And it causes two serious problems: (1) If this wasn't exactly what the person wanted they have now lost the ability to use the account to contact the staff and clarify their request, e.g. to ask them to also remove sensitive information they had not noticed before; (2) If content was left up that should have been deleted, this now makes it far harder for the moderators to find that content as they can no longer search by username for it. So it is usually counterproductive. Changing the username is usually a far better way of achieving anonymity.
Conclusion
I hope that this helps people to consider what they actually wish to achieve, so when these situations arise they can either sort it out themselves or make clear and specific requests to the moderators / administrator.
Remember, once something is posted on the internet, it is in the public domain and could have been copied by anybody. If you wish to hide something from somebody, it may not matter if the staff here delete it - it may already have been seen and saved. Or somebody could simply go to an automated archiving site like the "Wayback machine" and view an older version of this forum from before the content was deleted. It is better to think carefully about what you write before posting it, than to post too much and then try to have it deleted later. So please do not pester the staff to do things and get upset if we would prefer to handle the situation differently - because whatever we do may be completely irrelevant anyway. Only post things on the public forum that you are happy to be in public in the first place. If you have a particularly difficult situation please use an anonymous username and keep other identifying information private, so that any people you would wish to keep the information private from are unlikely to find it or recognise it if they did. Use private conversations for especially sensitive information or sharing off-site contact details.
When this occurs for a reason that is stressful, I tend to get contacted by people asking me to urgently do something about it. I then have to have a detailed conversation with them to figure out what is happening and what they are actually requesting, before I can then decide how to sort it out. Unfortunately often in such situations their need is urgent, or they are emotionally upset, and a long conversation is not what they were wanting to have.
In this post I want to outline a clear policy around removing content from the forum, to make it clearer and easier for everybody. The situation is very different for removal of personal information, and leaving the forum entirely, so I will address both separately.
From the perspective of the ministry, the past discussions on this forum are an invaluable teaching resource. Most of us spent many hours reading old discussions before signing up. We try to preserve old discussions as much as possible to retain their teaching value, and are reluctant to delete comments from them as this has the potential to make the conversation confusing and unreadable - or even remove one viewpoint entirely and leave it one-sided. When people were the minority view in a conversation their posts can be essential to retain balance and ensure future readers are not steered towards the opposite viewpoint. And when people are in difficult personal situations, their posts can be some of the most valuable contributions which others can learn from - even a disastrous situation can be invaluable, even if only as a warning. If a situation is something others could learn from, we would prefer to anonymise the details (names, location etc) and leave it visible than to delete it.
This policy simply puts in writing the way I have been balancing these competing interests for a number of years. It explains what you can do yourself, and when and how to ask for assistance.
Help, I shared personal information and I need it gone!
Specific posts:
- Depending on how old the post is and your own privileges on the site, there may be "Edit" and "Delete" buttons under your post. If so, feel free to edit or delete the post yourself.
- If these buttons don't appear, click the "Report" button to flag the post for a moderator to look at, and in the message ask the moderator to remove the post.
- If someone else has shared personal information about you, or has quoted a post of yours that you want deleted, report their post also and ask the moderator to edit or remove as appropriate.
- Click the "Report" button on the first post in the thread, and ask a moderator to remove the entire thread.
Other content
You may have also posted content in these places, which you should be able to edit or delete yourself. Hover over your username (top right of the page) to view these:
- Profile page. Edit under "Personal Details".
- Signature. Edit under "Signature"
- Messages on your "wall". Edit under "Your Profile Page"
General privacy
You can take a range of measures to determine who can view your profile page, and who can contact you privately. Check out your "Privacy" settings.
Private conversations
You can delete conversations from your own inbox, but just like with emails the other participants will still retain copies unless they choose to delete them also. Forum staff have no access to private conversations.
Chat
Chat messages are very temporary, and disappear after a few hours or when the chatroom is closed. But you can also hover over a message and click the red X to delete it immediately.
Username (e.g. you used your real name, but need to hide your identity):
- NEW FEATURE: You may now change your own username. Click on your username in the top-right corner of the screen, and select "Account Details". Type in a new username, and (for administrative reasons) a brief reason for why you are changing it. To avoid abuse of this system, you cannot change your username again for 30 days afterwards, so make sure you choose the right name in the first place.
- Alternatively (or if you made a mistake and need it corrected), send a private message to the administrator (@FollowingHim in the first instance, @nathan if he is unavailable), asking them to change your username to something else. This will be fastest if you can give more than one suggested username, so if your first is unavailable the admin can immediately change it to one of your other options rather than having a long conversation working out what the username should be.
Leaving the forum
If you no longer wish to participate on the forum, the simplest option is to just log out and not return. There is no need for the moderators or administrator to do anything.
However, if you wish to disappear more thoroughly from the site and not be contacted in future, you may wish to first make a few small changes to your privacy and email notification settings. You may optionally:
- Go to your "Privacy" settings and lock down your account so nobody can view your profile or send you messages.
- Go to your "Contact Details" settings, and uncheck the boxes "Receive site mailings" and "Receive email when a new conversation message is received".
Do not ask the staff to delete your account. We will not usually delete an account, because on the public forum all this does is to change the username to "Guest" and leave all the content up anyway, it does little of value. And it causes two serious problems: (1) If this wasn't exactly what the person wanted they have now lost the ability to use the account to contact the staff and clarify their request, e.g. to ask them to also remove sensitive information they had not noticed before; (2) If content was left up that should have been deleted, this now makes it far harder for the moderators to find that content as they can no longer search by username for it. So it is usually counterproductive. Changing the username is usually a far better way of achieving anonymity.
Conclusion
I hope that this helps people to consider what they actually wish to achieve, so when these situations arise they can either sort it out themselves or make clear and specific requests to the moderators / administrator.
Remember, once something is posted on the internet, it is in the public domain and could have been copied by anybody. If you wish to hide something from somebody, it may not matter if the staff here delete it - it may already have been seen and saved. Or somebody could simply go to an automated archiving site like the "Wayback machine" and view an older version of this forum from before the content was deleted. It is better to think carefully about what you write before posting it, than to post too much and then try to have it deleted later. So please do not pester the staff to do things and get upset if we would prefer to handle the situation differently - because whatever we do may be completely irrelevant anyway. Only post things on the public forum that you are happy to be in public in the first place. If you have a particularly difficult situation please use an anonymous username and keep other identifying information private, so that any people you would wish to keep the information private from are unlikely to find it or recognise it if they did. Use private conversations for especially sensitive information or sharing off-site contact details.
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