Deleting Threads (and Posts)

[~d~]

Okay I think I need to give you a little of my background here….

I spent almost a year posting on a daily basis at another forum under the name I originally brought over to the library. My over 2000 posts were almost exclusively to a single thread that I helped to develop. The entire purpose of it was to give lurkers a place to come and feel comfortable while learning the ins and outs of how the boards worked. It also gave writers a place to talk through ideas.. .

This thread grew beyond what the original founders could have ever imagined. We had new people posting on almost a daily basis. At the core there were 6 people who kept it a place that people wanted to come to. Most of the people came and went very quickly…. They found their niches and moved on… other would lurk and just post enough that we knew they were watching and enjoying what they saw…it was a flame free zone on a board that had entire forums that were nothing but flamings…and for anyone that has been flamed or known someone who’s only interest is in seeing how much damage they can inflict knows… that is saying a lot.

That is not to say it was problem free.. there were plenty of problems behind the scenes.. there were some very strong people involved but it was a very rare thing for any of that to make it into the public eye…

Over time though it would on occasion happen…someone would feel slighted or ignored… someone would get hurt … and tempers would fly… but over time we had found ways to diffuse those types of situations but it always took time…

well in the middle of one of those situations one of the original posters decided that he’d had enough… so he contacted a mod… in literally the blink of an eye… over 10.000 posts were gone from a single thread ….Please understand this was a thread that had never even been off the first page of the forum in which it was placed…and suddenly it was just not there anymore….a year of my life…gone…. Inside that thread were so many little stories…stories found no where else … writing contests where the prize was just the sharing between friends… we had laughed there and cried there… we had had celebrations… and we had mourned there… we had shared ideas… and philosophies…we had flirted and we had fallen in love…we had made friendships and forged bonds…there is a little piece of me that I think will always mourn the loss of that place... we tried to recreate it...but it just didn't work... the magic of it was loss...

You’d think something like that couldn’t happen… but it did… what scares me is that it could just as easily happen here…because there is nothing to prevent it from happening...

Do I know what has been moved… no
Do I know where things have been moved to….no
In all likely hood unless I was directly involved in a thread I wouldn’t have clue anyway…

What I do know is the worse case scenario…because I lived through it…and it scares me that it could happen here...