Do deleted posts just vanish *poof* or do they linger in a secret forum for a while before they go away?
I ask because I was very sad to see that two of my Neohome posts from earlier this year have apparently already been pruned, and I don't seem to have copies on my hard drive. I was wondering if there were still copies floating around somewhere that someone could send me, or if they're gone forever.
No, they disappear permanently; we have a problem with database space, so storing them before deletion is not feasible. I would consider changing this, except for one thing: currently, no forums are set to auto-prune bar Oubliette, which is a forum normal users can't see. So your topic must have been pruned months ago - three months minimum, but likely a lot longer, given that the oldest remaining topics in AaToW, the ones which survived the prune, are over a year old. I had expected any opposition to it then, not now.
No, these posts were well under a year old - no earlier than May. So dunno why there's a few older posts in AatoW, but it has clearly pruned a lot more recently than last year. (Except for those three stray older posts rogue posts, there's nothing on there earlier than July, so it seems that AatoW has pruned or otherwise deleted a lot of posts then.)
I'd suggest that in future, you make a habit of saving anything particularly important, since I've never made any guarantees about the permanence of forum content; I believe I said as much when the forum migrated in September.
I don't understand... I knew there was a forum called Oubliette, I didn't know if some of the pruned posts were still there, I thought it couldn't hurt to ask to see whether the posts were still kicking around in there or not.
Have I done something wrong? It was just a question.
Oubliette is currently empty; I checked when I saw your post. I think a lot of the pruning is done manually now, so copies don't stick around. The issue, I suppose, is that they still take up space in Oubliette, and we're trying to keep the pressure on the server at a minimum. But no, of course you didn't do anything wrong by asking: how else are you supposed to know?
No problem, everything's sorted. Thanks for checking Oubliette for me! It's too bad about the posts, but such is life. I'll have to be more careful to save big posts when I make them from now on.
Thanks for checking Oubliette for me! It's too bad about the posts, but such is life. I'll have to be more careful to save big posts when I make them from now on.