Forum:How Can I Remove My Post From Biostar.

Question

[shilpy]

I was to remove previous posts from this site, how can I do that. Thanks!

[Neilfws]

This is a question, not a tip.

[Michael]

Isn't it 'forum'?

Answer 1

[Michael]

Consider the folllowing: Please don't delete questions which have answers already. Also, moderators might undelete posts in that case.

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

I completely agree with Michael. Please consider that other people have invested time in giving an answer to your question, and that if you remove it, their efforts will be wasted.

[Istvan Albert]

we will make a change so that answered questions can only be removed by moderators.

Answer 2

[Philipp Bayer]

Your comments have a tiny X to the far right - your own posts and answers have a "delete" button next to the "revisions/edit/close" buttons

[tasjfasfankihj]

I'm not seeing any delete button next to the "revisions, edit, close" buttons. I also don't see "revisions or close" buttons. What I do see are "Add comment, link, edit, and moderate" buttons.

One of my posts contains ideas for my Master's thesis I'd rather not show up in everyone's google search. I was hoping for a quick answer and then I would delete the post. I've been a little reckless and left the question up for 3 months and it's still there. Now I'm trying to delete it and can't figure out how.

Then I read the above posts and it sounds like deleting posts is either not possible or at minimum is made so difficult to figure out to try and prevent people from doing it. Really something that new users should be warned about.

Can anyone please tell me how posts can be deleted? Guess I'll give it a day then contact support.

[Devon Ryan]

The version of biostars you're looking at and that in use when the question above was posted aren't the same. I don't know that there's a way for regular users to delete posts now. We moderators can do that, though we can also still see them and undelete them. The simplest method for you would be to simply edit your post to remove the details you would like kept private. Note that you can't remove or edit replies (you could ask the respective authors to do so, but whether they do is completely up to them).

BTW, in the future you might post this sort of thing as a forum question. This site isn't really designed for asking questions in answers.

[Michael]

The warning is - even if not as explicit as it could be - given in the License:

Licensing

All content on Biostar is licensed via the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This means that you should attribute the work either to the author and/or to the site, depending on the scope and presentation of the information. In addition our community supports the fair use policy when it comes to content created by users of this site.

And further under the License explanation we find:

You are free to:

• Share - copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
• Adapt - remix, transform, and build upon the material
• for any purpose, even commercially.
• The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

By posting, you grant BioStars/the world (it's not totally clear to me who is licensee here) an irrevocable license for any content you created. You can ask to delete it, which might or might not happen, and any other person in possession of the content can re-share and re-mix it at will, here, or elsewhere, only requirement is attributing it to the author.

[Istvan Albert]

Posting on Biostars is publishing to the world - even if you were to remove it from here content will show up in search indexes, wayback machines, database dumps, site crawlers, site backups etc.

In addition in my opinion posting a question just to get a quick answer then deleting the post is not an appropriate etiquette. I would to call that rude because it breaks the social contract of the site.. Imagine if everyone did that. When someone responds they do so to benefit not just the the original poster but others as well. Most people here would not actually bother to write a response if they knew the author of a question intends to delete their contributions.

[tasjfasfankihj]

You're right. Looking back, maybe not the best etiquette to ask as question I intended to delete. However, if someone gave a good enough answer that I felt bad about ruining for other people, I would have figured out a way to only edit out the somewhat sensitive info. Also IMO bad etiquette for a question/answer site to not allow users to delete their posts in an era where we are increasingly defined by things like what shows up in a google search. What if someone asks a bad question they won't want brought up in a job interview 5 years later, for example? Not to mention an environment where you have to worry about permanence disincentivizes you to ask questions at all, unless you are sure it makes you look good. But if you already knew that, maybe you didn't need to ask the question. Idk just some things to think about. Also Devon thank you for the advice I will do that...and also not post any more questions in replies :)

[Istvan Albert]

A user can edit their own post at any time, they can also change their username at any time. These two options together allow users to alter their own contributions as they wish. So I don't see problems there, perhaps this was not clear to you right away. (In addition there is a less obvious post deletion option as well)

What regular users should not be able to do is remove other people's contributions from the site. And that is what post deletion does because it removes the entire thread.. In fact your situation is not all that unique - there were other people that tried to use the site in ways it was not intended - this just brought it more into view.

Future versions of Biostar users will not not allow users to delete posts that have answers. Only moderators will be able to do that. Users can always edit their posts and put [deleted] in there.