Deleting posts -

Just thought I'd make a comment here so as not to veer the original discussion off-course and also about an issue that's been bothering me for a while:


Can I just kindly ask people not to do this? What does everyone else feel about this? There is really no end to frustration when I click on a thread to find that some or most of the posts have been deleted by their own authors, especially since the further discussions seems to be responding to a good point that has "now" been deleted.

It just makes very irritating reading to see a lot of blank spaces within a discussion and you're left wondering what the person said that was supposedly so controversial that needed deletion. This is especially true when you read old threads. It is not one individual who does this but a few over the past months or so. If there is really a genuine reason/need to have one's posts deleted then why not ask a moderator to delete it? Better still, it would be much better to spend some time thinking if what you're writing is appropriate and doesn't need to be deleted in future.

My comments are general and are not influenced by any specific person or situation except for the practice of deleting one's entire posts and replacing them with three dots or so. It makes irritating reading so can I humbly ask people to stop doing it?

You can.

I decided to do that after reading the reaction of others to what I was saying. I don't want to make any "points." I feel it is a sin to talk about some of these things before people who don't understand ie. people who think a conjugal desire for Krishna is "gross" or "material" etc. I should have thought of this before, but anyway, I could not sleep last night thinking what random people on the internet will be reading these things and thinking how degraded Krishna has become for being implicated in "sexual" play.

I knew someone would be mad. I'm sorry, Gaurasundara.

No, dear, I'm not mad. I fully understand how you felt and why you did it. I am just speaking about the practice of deleting posts itself which is done by some other people also. Sometimes I like to read the archives and I come across a thread where a lot of posts have been deleted by their authors after the discussion is over. The thread hardly makes any sense with so many blank spaces and so it becomes a little annoying to read and figure out what everyone is saying or replying to.

That's all. Nothing personal and no hard feelings.

I and Jagadananda are also disturbed by the practice of removing posts from a thread afterwards. We feel it is disrespectful to everyone else who participated in the thread. It renders the thread pretty much unintelligible.

If someone feels the thread may be inappropriate or that there may be another reason for removing all posts in such a manner, we'd like to request him or her to not post in that thread to begin with.

Good idea. But, only for the men.
A lady always reserves the right to change her mind.
You didn't know that Madhava?

For the record, the forum software has the facility for freezing post-edits after X minutes / hours after the post has been made. As this cannot be activated on an individual basis without modifications to the software, I would much prefer to not activate the feature, as there are a good many of us who wish to fix typos etc. in some of our older posts. However, if this persists, we'll turn it on regardless. The moderators can override that in any case and return to their old posts, so it's not really anything away from us.

You won't have to worry about any more of this from me.

I must confess to deleting my own posts. Some, like myself often do and say things that might be deemed or indeed be inapproriate, and it's really handy to be able to delete it. The four human defects would account for it. It's not a good habit I admit.

A single post isn't that much of an issue. Wholesale removals is.

If you wish to ensure that your post retains its context even if something like this happens, please quote the relevant portions of the post you're responding to in your post. Regardless of this topic, that's a good habit to learn.

There's a good solution to this: wait a while. That's one of the advantages of writing, that we can think twice before publishing, as a gentle person thinks twice before speaking. So it's often a good idea to compose offline, let it simmer a while, revise if you think it's helpful, and think once again before posting. (Just because it's possible to respond immediately doesn't always mean it's a good idea.) There are countless times I wish I had done this. These are the time I had to come back, apologize for intemperate remarks, and eat crow because I'm often the one carping from the corner about the way we discuss things among ourselves.

Apologies for recent multi-posting the same topics from me recently. It first happened to me at home, and seems to be happening to me even though I am at a cybercafe now. I trust that moderators will delete the 'extras'.