Submitted 3 weeks ago by roofuskit@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Please don’t expect the community to give you answers to your questions which you then delete right afterwards. Those of us who put time into answering your questions are not doing so just to serve your personal needs, we are here to help build a community knowledge base that others can search and reference.
This has become a chronic issue with Lemmy and its starting to feel like it’s a waste of time to answer questions.
Is it people deleting specific posts, or people deleting their accounts? I do find it kind of weird that when you delete your account, it deletes all the data you contributed. Maybe it’s the right choice though, IDK.
Not seen that on Lemmy, but it’s definitely been a problem on reddit for years. Agree with you - the questions and answers (and even the wrong answers) are valuable to anyone else searching for the same issue. “I got my answer, now fuck y’all”
Hadn’t noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.
“fuck you got mine”
I have mixed feelings on post deletion. On the one hand, historical technical forum conversations are an incredibly valuable resource, and /c/selfhosted is a technical community. The value comes from having a history in context, and deleting part of the context damages the whole and makes the whole corpus less useful overall. It also allows incorrect or outdated information to fester when there isn’t a strong historical context that can be referenced.
On the other hand, people are right to be concerned about leaving large tracts of text available on the open internet, where it can be scraped, profiled, and possibly de-anonymized. I am very sympathetic to those who delete out of concerns for their own privacy, and I don’t know what a good solution is.
Maybe a compromise would be (on user “delete") to leave the contents of a post intact, but simply delete the username from the post, and the post from the user’s history? Deletion on the fediverse is a bit of a sham anyway, and it would leave valuable discussions intact for other users.
I think a good solution would be to create a community specifically to connect people who don’t want to share their posts and people willing to provide individual help. They could find each other and DM a conversation. Milking a public forum for advice and then vandalizing it by deleting the post is definitely NOT a good solution, and I do not share your sympathy for people who do that. It’s like curtaining off a few back rows of a bus to use all day as an office - although that could have been funny in a Seinfeld episode.
That would be any freelancing hiring platform.
Unfortunately, this is nothing new. Forums have been dealing with this for decades. XKCD even made a comic about forum posts going stale.
Not really the same issue. The xkcd is about unsolved or incompletely resolved issues. This Herr is about questions vanishing along with the answers.
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
Yeah I think this is a tool worth having for mods. Maybe going through deleted posys and seeing who are repeat offenders.
To me, that isn’t building a community, that’s extracting from one. It’s no better than AI scraping. You got your answer and then keep it for yourself.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago I haven’t noticed many posts deleted by the user themselves. I see a lot of ‘deleted by user’ comments. I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact. That way, someone searching can cross-moginate whatever their issues are with what solved the issue for me. Maybe the user deleting the post once it was solved is embarrassed they asked a supposedly ‘stupid’ question?
I try to remember to put [SOLVED] on any serious post I make, after the fact.
You (and folks who do the same) are unsung heroes. Thank you.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m a hero. It just seems a ‘thank you’ and a [SOLVED] would be a common courtesy, especially if someone took the time, and had the patience to muck through my feeble brain to tweeze out exactly what the issue was. LOL
Protip, if you think about what you post before you post it, you don’t have to scrub the record after the fact. :D
Why does this need a post? Just don’t respond?
dieTasse@feddit.org 2 weeks ago I found this an interesting point worth thinking about. And I kinda agree, why delete good information.
Because I have no idea if the questioner is going to do that beforehand
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago How the fuck are you supposed to know the person you’re answering will or won’t delete the post after?
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago oh shit son, you running this show too? Nice work trying to keep people in line and keeping the knowledge around, and again, great work on your light touch moderation on YSK, you’re doing great.
What
Sometimes I assume the mods delete them because no one answered
Have you checked the modlogs to see if the posts you’re talking about were deleted by the mods? The mods here seem to really not want this community to be a support community and will delete it under Rule 3.
Realistically, a platform where you can delete your own questions so that they disappear for everyone isn’t the best platform for technical support communities. But a platform where you can’t delete your own posts is not the best platform for for a lot of other things, like privacy.
Two use cases without overlap seems like a good argument that there should be two different platforms.
Better than fucking Discord. I won’t even engage with a project that uses Discord as it’s support channel. Fuck that.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CF | CloudFlare |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
[Thread #337 for this comm, first seen 4th Jun 2026, 18:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Bad bot.
The bot must be upvoting itself because yet again it listed a bunch of random abbreviations that aren’t in the thread at all.
Someone claimed it’s not ai slop but a bot with GitHub code but that code doesn’t produce this result.
It is suspicious that the bot “found” cloudflare without it being mentioned…
Remind me in the morning, I’ll take it down for investigation.
gedfromgont@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago It is maybe weird but folks should be allowed to delete stuff again. There is no rule against it either. Make it one if it is something that the broader community doesn’t like.
Anyone can delete their posts.
Problem is that if they ask questions, get resolutions and then nuke the post - resolution gets nuked too. That is how communities die. Firstly, no one will seek answers here because it is not here anymore. Secondly, users will spawn lots of posts with the same question since the answer got nuked, which will annoy prevalent users.
Wouldn’t it be more better if a question with an answer stays on the forum for everyone to see? Hasn’t it happened to you to find a post with an issue discussed that is similar to yours except there is no answer anymore since it got nuked and all it has is a post title?
I know I’ve seen
[removed]
^[deleted]^
too many times.
dieTasse@feddit.org 2 weeks ago I think its not about being allowed or not. Its about thinking before deleting if the action helps you in anyway and not doing it maybe helps many others.
Don’t make the post if you don’t want others to benefit from it.
PM a random person and bother them if you want to be selfish hoard the info for yourself. Don’t make a public post on a public messaging board if you don’t want that info to be public.
It’s selfish. Dont post questions to a public forum if you don’t want them public. We’re a community, not a concierge service.
gedfromgont@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago I am just sitting here laughing over the fact that this is the very reason people hated on reddit. When reddit wouldn’t allow people to remove their helpful posts when they left, and everyone was outraged. But since we are not reddit here, it is of course a wholly different thing.
Don’t worry, I see my opinion is unpopular, so this is the last I say on this.
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago Has that been happening a lot here?
Lemmy in general, yes. Here in self hosted at least a couple of times that I’ve seen. Including earlier today. But I don’t interact on every post.
I only find out because sometimes I like to go back to posts I comment on and see what additional information people have offered. (There’s always something to learn.) Then I find the post has been deleted.
I absolutely detest how on lemmy deleting a post also nukes access to the comments. They’re still there, but there’s no way in many normally lemmy UI to get to them.
teft@piefed.social 2 weeks ago Are you sure the post wasn’t modded? Those also show up as “deleted”.
I see now there were 3 posts removed in the past that all seen relevant to the community me. Going back I see ones I’ve read and interacted with.
Seems like it might be more mod actions to me, as others have pointed out. Maybe a more general self hosted community if the mod doesn’t want those sorts of (relevant to selfhosters but not specifically selfhost software announcements or whatever) posts here.
Is there any way for a community to disallow post deletion? If not, this seems like a needed feature.
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it’s happening.
I did notice a post that was looking for help, then apparently labelled “solved”… then deleted for some reason. 😞
Was it this one?
Mod Removed Post Extending A LUKS Encrypted HDD To Utilize All Of The Drive (500 GB) [SOLVED] reason: Rule 3
Oh yes that was it!
So, mod removed. I feel less annoyed. 😄
DenverCoder9 strikes again?
pageflight@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Does deleting the root post nuke the whole thread?