a few photos of me* have been posted on here without me realising when I’ve been to meats. I guess I should expect it, but since I intentionally don’t post my face on here it rankles somewhat
*with me just about visible
Hi All,
Only just seeing this and struggling to parse all your messages.
I think this Terms of Service was auto generated when we set the forum up - hence the replace with company name stuff Terms of Service - Drowned in Sound | Community
From what I can see very few digest emails go out but struggling to find where in the admin area this data might be. Not sure that helps.
This forum is a free service for you to use and we’re subject to the features of these forums. I’m not profiting from anything posted here (in fact these forums would close were it not for your kind donations) and am not disseminating anything on mass with malicious intent.
I understand why this is unsettling but it’s unlikely that it’s going to very many people. And most who even get these emails probably delete them straight away or they sit unread in bloated inboxes (speaking as someone with a near infinite unread count in my inbox).
I think it’s worth remembering that everything you post publicly online is scraped and cached by various services from Google to archive.org the second you post it. For instance, I can still read Ryan Adams’ hate blog about me from a decade ago that he deleted hours after posting.
I realise none of this helps and that there are worst case scenarios at play in this discussion but reading back these posts I’m struggling to fully comprehend the outrage but that may be because I’ve lived my life quite publicly and know how few people pay attention to anything. I’ve always understood that anything I post publicly is permanently somewhere and out of my control but perhaps that isn’t an assumed default for everyone?
I’m sorry to anyone who feels like they’ve been deceived or exploited. That certainly is not my intention. These forums are not meant to upset anyone nor cause undue stress.
I’ll look into solutions if it puts people’s minds at ease but there’s very little functionality that I can control beyond changing default settings.
Best
Sean
7 Likes
Hey Sean.
As always, I think it’s a given that we all appreciate your dedication (and level of busyness) to these forums, especially when you could have taken them down months ago and not had to deal with any of the subsequent drama. That deserves a LOT of credit.
I guess by your response that you’re saying there is no clever way of deleting threads after a certain period etc. That’s OK, and I think we all need to be more mindful of what we share and where that might end up. I suppose the uproar was borne only out of the realisation that images, which it seems, however arbitrary, were mainly of women, were getting shared via an algorithm as a means of getting people to revisit the forums.
If there is anything that can be done to minimise this, just to ensure the community remains relatively safe and open, then I think that’s to everyone’s benefit. I cannot speak for anyone else, but as I’ve previously stated I get a lot from these boards, and they’re incredibly supportive when it comes to things like mental health etc. 
6 Likes
Noooooo I don’t think anyone thinks this, I sure don’t. I totally understand it’s a default Discourse thing and nothing you or the mods have done, totally get there’s nothing insidious going on, just saying if it can be fixed somehow it’d be best if the emails didn’t pull stuff from threads where people are likely to be posting personal information (ssp threads and selfie threads mainly I guess)
(btw thanks sean and mods for taking a look at this, you’re a GBOL)
8 Likes
It’s odd, I’ve had a few but the description implied to me that it would only be if I didn’t visit here for a week but obviously that rarely (ever?) happens so it’s obviously slamming out a lot more frequently.
@sean you can ask here
https://meta.discourse.org
for more help with tracking down stats around them I would think.
Mine too
4 Likes
Also I feel a bit bad that @anon76851889 seems to have decided to take all this on on his own. I hope you’re sharing the load a bit!
We’re all talking about it in the ole inbox etc, I definitely don’t want him to do it all on his own
3 Likes
Crossed my mind btw that threads can be turned into private messages, shared with only those who posted.
If people would like to keep a selfie thread yet not have it public a mod could make this change to some?
1 Like
isn’t there a post limit on private threads of like 500 or whatever it is?
Oh maybe. No idea. Never been involved in such a mega posting of personal messages 
Not everyone has access I think but could be wrong
1 Like
there’s private threads for the DiS_State label stuff and they always max out at 500
we’re on the tenth rollover now … 5000 posts!
1 Like
You can delete accounts with under a certain number of posts
It’s not a large number. I increased it once and it almost destroyed the server when I tried to delete the guy.
1 Like
It’s about 20,000 posts it used to be less than that but after some requests to delete accounts and all associated posts we increased the post threshold alongside the user age (i.e users who’s first post is older than (x) days).
1 Like
Yeah it’s there, but I think the reason it hasn’t come up more is that the overwhelming majority of the people who ask to have their accounts deleted etc have more than the max amount of posts you can have for it to be actually deleted. Hence the anonymising option being used way more.
It’s not like this is a secret thing that we will only do if someone knows exactly what to ask for. Whenever someone messages us to have their account deleted/locked down/anonymised or whatever, we look at what options are available for that specific account and go from there. If the account has less than xxx posts then obviously complete deletion is a possibility that we will put forward, no matter how the request is worded.
Should add this was right near the start of the site. It’s actually possible they’ve improved the system since then but as you never get a list of updates and changes from them I have never considered if it was now possible to delete members with lots of posts.
Mistersappy had very few from what I recall.
Probably not because I think your old account was older than the maximum age threshold
This is what it currently says in the admin section of a user profile:
«Users can’t be deleted if they have posts. Delete all posts before trying to delete a user. (Posts older than 1460 days old can’t be deleted.)»
See above
1 Like