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I've made a couple of posts here and there to get some answers on how to do certain things, as I'm really new to this whole self-hosting thing. But after some time my thread gets auto-deleted, often before I can even get a solid answer to my question.
So, if /c/SelfHosted isn't where I should post beginner questions for the community to help me, where should I post? The sidebar provides no link to something like that.
It doesn't make sense, either. There's no rational reason to delete a thread after the question has been answered.
Even if it wasn't actually a person but was an AI agent asking questions so it can scrape the data from the answers, there's no real utility in deleting the posts after receiving responses. It just seems so weird.
Could they be astroturfing, looking for a specific solution to fill search engines with their own product placement, then deleting because most of the comments are other FOSS solutions?
Somebody pointed out that the person might be afraid they gave so much info that their post gets de-anonymized - but IMO people afraid of that shouldn't post on public forums to begin with.
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.
Is there any way for a community to disallow post deletion? If not, this seems like a needed feature.
or maybe a feature where posts cannot be deleted past a time period + amount of engagement.
I think the mods/admins would have more accurate info on how often it's happening.
Sure it's not also mods removing them?
that's a lot of rule 3
Looks like it's hybridsarcasims favorite rule
Wow crazy I couldn't imagine that this community gets enough posts to warrant so aggressively enforcing rules about the content.
Some people think that keeping a community laser focused attracts more readers through quality. It’s an ideal that I respect, but I’ve never really observed that to be true in reality.
If you’re reading this @HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz consider this my polite feedback that I completely get what you’re trying to accomplish but you might be working harder than you need to be.
Exactly, I could understand it on the huge subreddits with one question per minute, but here is so silent...
Plus, as a user, when a mod deletes a post that I took over ten minutes to write, I go "fuck It" and stop contributing altogether (this also includes replying to other posts)
Wow a lot of those mod-deleted posts were very interesting for me
https://lemmy.world/post/39025760
wtf? Half the post is nuked even after being locked. I don't even see how such a small community can be so stuck up about relevancy and purity washing selfhosted as if we all own our own DNS registrars and can do outbound SMTP.
It's a major pet peeve of mind when places get overly zealous about moderating what is on or off topic when the volume of posts doesn't warrant it. Especially when there has already been some discussion on the posts.
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.
This is more likely the answer. I've seen multiple popular posts get deleted from here. I wish Lemmy did the soft delete method instead so that history is kept.
we need to make a list of usernames who are deleting their posts, regularly or even just twice
Yeah it's more than likely the same people doing it all the time.
Edit: either that or AI bots farming information from Lemmy to feed their databases.
I just want to apologize for being the person who asks questions and then doesn't respond to the comments. I get overwhelmed D: but I'd never delete my post, what's the purpose in that?
Someone may have the same question in the future and there will be answers. You not responding is not that bad but it is even better that you do and provide an update to your situation, if you wish.
Well OP. Looks like your post resulted in a moderator resigning and the appointment of two new moderators in this community. As I've said previously, it was a moderator removing posts for a very far stretch interpretation of Rule 3, and not users deleting them after getting the answer.
Let's hope this results in a better community for the selfhosters here.
Hadn't noticed, but wow. I wonder what the motivation is to delete info that would help other people.
"fuck you got mine"
I've never understood why the OP can nuke an entire thread full of comments. Not even reddit is that obtuse.
This is the same thing as posting on a forum a question, then saying never mind I figured it out WITHOUT STATING THE ANSWER! When googling shit and coming across this back in the day I would get more mad at those than my issue.
Yes! This drives me crazy. I will sometimes go back and edit posts to add more info months later.
We have all been in a situation where we are looking for a very specific answer, and the answer only exists in one obscure forum from a decade ago that has the exact info we are looking for.
It's hard enough to ensure lemmy's long-term fidelity without people axing their own content.
Oh, I thought this was about me since I just asked for file transfer stuff but you're specifically talking about deleting it right after. It happened to me on asklemmy where the user deleted it right after
dick move.
Which users are doing that so I can block them?
Pretty sure lots of the “deleted” posts were actually removed by the mods. Rule 3 seems to be a popular justification for post removal in this community, and it basically outlaws all of the “my server is having this issue, anyone got any ideas” types of posts that OP has cited.
While I agree it’s popular for removing posts, maybe it shouldn’t be. If we want users to organically find Lemmy, one of the best ways to do that is the same way users end up at Reddit: By googling an error code, and finding a five year old “Edit: I figured it out. Here is what I did” post.
Or maybe we just need to make (and properly support) a community that is dedicated to those kinds of posts. If a “my server is broken plz help” post isn’t relevant to /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world, maybe we need to make a /c/SelfHostedSupport to redirect the Rule 3 posts to.
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 did notice a post that was looking for help, then apparently labelled "solved"... then deleted for some reason. 😞
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.