Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Published on February 14, 2009 By Draginol In Blogging

Awhile back we put in a feature that only rarely gets used and never on JU before. It’s called Destroy Account.  What happens is the system goes and wipes out every post, every comment that user has ever made on all our sites.

I got to use it today on LW. I had exiled her for comparing a tax cut to corporate welfare and then as being the same as the welfare that the Octuplet mom receives for her 14 children.

I’ve said this in the past but occasionally needs to be repeated – there is no “free speech” here.  I invite others to create blogs and post on whatever they want with only a few exceptions – personally attacking each other and me in particular.

I would like to think we’re a lot more tolerant than say the DailyKos or the Huffington Post who wouldn’t put up for a second having bloggers who attack their benefactor or even having a different ideology than their benefactor.

I don’t really pay that much attention to JU these days. I don’t care if someone is liberal or conservative and I’ll happily engage in a debate.  Where I draw the line is when people come after me or my company personally.  At that point, I have pretty much no tolerance.

Anyway, I wasn’t planning on destroying LW’s account utterly but she couldn’t restrain herself from making one last goodbye post where she complained that I would keep her posts so that I could make a few cents off her writings.  To to oblige her on her fear that her writings wouldn’t profit me, I used the destroy account feature to remove all evidence of her writings and comments from the site.


Comments (Page 1)
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on Feb 14, 2009

Some people are just self destructive.  I think she is definitely one.

on Feb 14, 2009

I wish I had seen the fireworks before they got deleted.

on Feb 14, 2009

I just got an e-mail from Little Whip. She asked me to post this.

I'd like my photo removed from the 'top users' list.  I tried to change it to just a small generic avatar via WC this morning, prior to the account itself being nuked, but didn't have anything small enough to upload, nor any software to scale another image down to size. I'd like my image removed from the JU Home page and/or any related Stardock owned sites.

 Me again:I wish it didn't come down to this.

on Feb 14, 2009

Me again:I wish it didn't come down to this.

Me too. (she told me to pass along the same thing. And she also said to not sweat it because "this is probably for the best.")

I am sure going to miss her.

on Feb 14, 2009

 Wow, I've been on and off this week and didn't notice anything!

on Feb 14, 2009

Could you "Destroy account" on Asaxygirl please?  She requested this in an email last time there was a free speech issue here, and no one so much as wrote back to her.

on Feb 14, 2009

If it helps, I can have her come in and lob a bunch of insults until your dander is high enough to push the button

on Feb 14, 2009

Free Speech? Whats that? I think it existed a few hundred years ago.....

 

on Feb 14, 2009

OckhamsRazor


Could you "Destroy account" on Asaxygirl please?  She requested this in an email last time there was a free speech issue here, and no one so much as wrote back to her.

People can destroy their own accounts from the dashboard.

on Feb 14, 2009

People can destroy their own accounts from the dashboard.

 

Not that we can find.  Care to be more specific?

on Feb 15, 2009

...

on Feb 15, 2009

www.joeuser.com -> My Dashboard -> Articles

This brings up a list of articles that you've authored. From here you view, check referrals, edit or delete any and all of the articles/threads that you've authored. You do have to do them one at a time but at least you can do this from a single place. It's not quite the same as delete account since as far as I can tell there's no way to delete your replies to other people's articles.

Also there can be some overlap between "articles" specifically written as such versus "threads" created on one of Stardock's other "forum" sites. This occurs for those that regularly visit (and post) from more than one site. It can seem somewhat random as to what gets listed in the "Your Articles" list. Also when you delete things in this manner it does seem to take a little time for all the info to propagate throughout the system.

[edit]

There is an alternate path to almost the same thing via SD's "other" blog site Impulsedriven. In this case the path is (note the .net):

http://www.impulsedriven.net/ -> My Dashboard -> Articles

Which takes you to a similar "Your Articles" list except that the articles listed will only include articles in forums that are accessible from Impulsedriven as opposed forums accessible to JU. If this were the sole differences then that would make sense but there does seem to be the occasional discrepancy that doesn't fit any pattern.

When I was growing up the closets in my grandmothers house did not have a back wall to them and so you could crawl from the closet in one room to the closet in an adjacent room. To a five year old this seemed like secret passageways throughout the house. SD's forum sites are somewhat like that.

[/edit]

on Feb 15, 2009

This brings up a list of articles that you've authored. From here you view, check referrals, edit or delete any and all of the articles/threads that you've authored. You do have to do them one at a time but at least you can do this from a single place. It's not quite the same as delete account since as far as I can tell there's no way to delete your replies to other people's articles.

Also there can be some overlap between "articles" specifically written as such versus "threads" created on one of Stardock's other "forum" sites. This occurs for those that regularly visit (and post) from more than one site. It can seem somewhat random as to what gets listed in the "Your Articles" list. Also when you delete things in this manner it does seem to take a little time for all the info to progate through the system.

 Eh...

 

If it helps, I can have her come in and lob a bunch of insults until your dander is high enough to push the button

That'd be a lot easier Ock -not to mention way more fun!

on Feb 15, 2009

Eh...
If this mystifies you then consider that the last time I counted there were 755 different forums spread over 11 different forum sites of which 373 forums were unique. I say were because it was about 5 months ago when I made that exhaustive search. Since then SD has added the Elemental site and undoubtedly new forums associated with it as well as increased the exposure of forums across sites.

I find this fascinating although admittedly it is very confusing.

One thing is that all the sites, both blog and forum, share the same database of articles/threads and so even though a particular forum may not be accessible on a particular site *all* threads can be viewed from *any* site using the article/thread number.

For instance this article in the “Blogging” forum (https://forums.joeuser.com/forum/16) is accessed at https://forums.joeuser.com/339791. But if you happened to know the article number, 339791, then you can also access this from any other of SD’s sites even though the Blogging forum is not otherwise accessible by using the following syntax, https://forums.galciv2.com/339791.

There’s even more to this since many forums on many sites are “invisible” in that they don’t appear in any top level category list but post activity to these forums still scroll by on the site's recent post list. There are actually 3 forms of invisible forums dependent on the method used to discover that they actually exist.

As I said fascinating.

on Feb 15, 2009

I will certainly make sure they make it as easy as possible for people to remove their own blogs. 

In the meantime, I will happily do it for them if they just comment here.

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