Entering edit mode
5 months ago
noodle
▴
590
Hi mods,
It seems that many meaningful posts were deleted? I sometimes direct peers to posts that I know existed here for explanations of problems, but I now see that many posts no longer exist. What gives?
Give us examples. Mods will undelete posts (that an original poster decides to delete, if they have received at least one comment/answer). Only posts that get deleted are duplicate copies (when people hit submit multiple times by mistake), posts that a user decides to remove shortly after posting (before the post receives any comments/answers) and those that are identified as spam by biostars SPAM bot/mods (mods do restore posts that get mistakenly marked as SPAM by bot).
Many posts get deleted after receiving comments. I know this from a personal experience, and it would be unlikely I am the only one whose responses on Biostars have disappeared. Not complaining, as you guys have plenty on your plate by fixing things that could easily be done by the users. If anything, I would complain about not educating users more in how to search for old posts and to format their entries better, even if that "increases the barrier for becoming a Biostars member."
If I delete a post I leave a comment that should remain visible to the person who's post was deleted that provides a reason. Only time I remember posts being massively changed was when there were exchanges that were not related to science. I don't think we have had any posts like that recently.
In this case OP is saying that "meaningful posts" were deleted so we would certainly like to know about them.
I've written a few how-to posts that are aimed to educate users. New users rarely invest time in reading before creating a new post so there's not much we can do there.
I personally undelete any post that has received as much as a comment that asks for clarification, and we'd really like your help in chasing down and undoing these deletion operations you observe. Would you like to join the mod team?
My point in one of previous posts was that users should be forced to educate themselves before being allowed to post. It takes away some of the burden from moderators . Yet that may be against the business model of this site as it would likely reduce the number of users and a daily traffic.
I was merely providing support for the OP's claim that posts do get deleted. From what I can tell, more often by users than by moderators. I have no capacity to track down deleted posts, even those that include my contributions.
How I wish this could be enforced - we used to have a mechanism to close zero-effort posts until the user put in some more effort but that's been removed in this version of biostars. I wonder if it could be implemented as a temporary suspension - kind of like on bioinfo SE.
As a moderator, you would. When people delete posts, mods usually restore them (some of us even add a comment asking the user not to delete posts). I don't think any meaningful posts are disappearing, I think OP's claim is based on maybe a few ancient posts that were lost during the move from old biostars to current biostars - I think Istvan tracked a few of those and restored them as well. This is why GenoMax is asking for examples - if this is in fact happening, we need to get on it fast.
OP can use Google Cache and archive.org to find posts that existed but no longer do, especially if they'd bookmarked them.
It's hard to search deleted posts.
Was this one removed by mods or the user (possibly me)? Post not found
I am going to tag Istvan Albert (site owner) since he is the only person who has the means of tracking things on database end to see what happened and if the post can be restored.
Was this example your post or a post you had posted in? It is possible for original posters to delete their posts. We try to catch when that happens and restore the deleted posts (this is a manual process) and include a note that posts that have received at least one comment/answer can't be deleted.
If we missed a original poster initiated deletion then there is not much we can do. Rest assured that posts that stay on post topic are never deleted by mods. If they don't answer the original question they will be relocated to comments.
I don't recall. It's only for an example here as I noticed that it was deleted and I had either commented or created the post.
This post seems to have disappeared from all records, which means it was a short lived post that existed a while ago. If you run into this problem, please alert us as soon as possible.
If you're not sure whether or not you created the post, all evidence I see points to it being created by you - only such a post would (a) disappear - because the creator deleted it and the system allows those posts to disappear; and (b) be allowed to be deleted - both post and comment were by the creator so mods did not consider the post as having received anyone's feedback.