The right to modify and delete you own forum posts

Hi,

Am I alone in defending the right to freely modify and delete you own forum posts?

I have been a JUCE user for while now and a bought a Pro license about a year ago.
When I signed up back in 2006, this was a simple phpBB forum. Users could modify their postings as much as they wanted and delete them.

As of 2017, users can’t delete, modify old posts or directly remove their account after a certain time.

When I realized that, I tried to request the deletion of all my posts but after a long conversation, Roli would only accept to delete only the posts that were not the start of a thread. I was told it was a matter of usability because those threads would not be readable anymore and they had done already a big effort to create holes in the other threads after deleting my other messages.

I believe that Roli took for granted that they could use the content of my posts eternally. Are we supposed to consider Gmail, Twitter and Facebook’s “we own everything you write” behaviour as natural? This was one of the reasons why I decided to pay for the license but now I feel let down. I really think I should be able to edit my own contents. If it were so important to save my old contributions, why should I feel discouraged to participate in the future?

1 Like

I don’t think anyone here has particularly strong feelings about this, other than, like we already said, it’s confusing for readers to see a thread that makes no sense.

But also, are you sure you can’t delete your posts…? As an admin I regularly see posts that are marked as “deleted by OP - will be removed in 24 hours”.

Without touching legal aspects, who owns the content, I would rather see the social dimension. You are communicating on the forum not only with Roli, but with a community of people spending their time helping each other. If you remove your questions or contributions, most times it makes the posts of your communication partners look stupid.

So I consider it a matter of politeness, not to compromise those, who already spent time to communicate with you.

I don’t know, how long the time period is, in which you can edit your post, but I think it is reasonable long enough, as I never ran into that problem. If not, I think it could be discussed.

And if you feel bad that you cannot revoke your post, because you regret looking stupid yourself, don’t worry, that happens to all of us.

I hope you still feel good participating in the juce community.

2 Likes

… and you should also consider that whatever hits the web may be cached / stored / preserved anywere outside the realm of the forum where you posted it. so I think that trying to remove it altogether as if it never existed is kinda hopeless, traces will be left anyway.

the license fee is to use the API commercially without needing to open-source your product. it has nothing to do with your forum posts.

I don’t know if this forum supports it, but on some other platforms a user can decide to remove his account altogether, in which case all the posts he did have their author changed into something like “Removed account”.

I admit it is pretty drastic, but that would be a way of anonymizing the content you posted in case you really need to do so. And then you can start over with another account on the same forum.

1 Like

To do that click on the 3 dots in the lower right of the message and it’ll show a trash can.

Rail

OK, here’s our official policy:

You have 60 days to delete a post yourself.

After that, if there’s a historic post that’s really really dumb and embarrassing, and you just can’t bear to let people see it, then contact an admin and we’ll remove it (after hopefully having a good laugh at how dumb it was :slight_smile: )

If you have hundreds of very old, generally dumb posts and you expect us to do a global removal of all of them, then no, sorry - that’s just too disruptive to the forum’s content, and that’s why this time-limit is there. We did this once for someone (who I presume is the anonymised OP of this thread) but it’s a total pain for us and our readers. For people who think trying to hide their internet history is a good idea, I’d draw your attention to this phenomenon:

Also bear in mind that this is the internet, and it’s perfectly OK to stay anonymous.

If you’re a n00b and suspect you may be talking crap, then it’s maybe a good idea to use a fake name while you learn your stuff.

If you’re confident that your posts will all make you sound smart, and want everyone to know who you are and which company you represent, then that’s awesome - please let everyone know who you are. BUT don’t expect too much sympathy from us if it turns out that you were just arrogant and regret it later. We’re happy to erase the occasional slip-up, but we have a duty to our other readers not to allow people to hide their tracks if they made a really big mess over a long period of time. (I bet Trump would probably like to be able to magically delete a lot of his historic tweets right now if he could…)

5 Likes

Thanks for clarifying.

… if it’s not a message that starts a new thread.

And that’s OK, I understand your view on this. However, I never thought that this forum would end up being compared to Twitter. I do regret things sometimes and I’ve never been victim of the Streisand effect by removing a post in a forum but I guess that the Internet has changed, so let it be.