response 44 of 170:

Jan 8 07:42 UTC 2004

Re. 42: I can't.

response 46 of 170:

Jan 8 09:18 UTC 2004

It doesn't.  That only lets you scribble things, not delete items.  As well,
it won't let me scribble things entered by accounts I remade, such as
polytarp.

response 48 of 170:

Jan 8 14:04 UTC 2004

I've taken you up on your invitation, gelinas. Personally, I don't see
anything I've said that can be construed as "annoying". Am I annoying because
I don't agree with you? Or because I believe for once the canadian posse is
right, and that affronts you. 

It was never my intenstion to annoy.Believe it or not, I really care about
Grex. I've bneen on and off since 1997, and I've been on regularly since March
of 2002. I've met some really nice people here, I like the discussions and
I don't want to see this turn into a place where complete items are removed,
losing a lot of the valuable discussion we have on here.

Joe, you've proven what I've suspected all along, but hoped wasn't true. 

I'd like all the items I've ever entered removed, and once I'm done I'd like
my user-id deleted.

Thanks for the good times.

response 50 of 170:

Jan 8 14:17 UTC 2004

I'll miss you, mynxcat.

response 52 of 170:

Jan 8 15:51 UTC 2004

I went over to M-Net and checked out the parody baby item.

Wow.  Some people, mynxcat among them, have definitely lost my respect.  I
don't mind parody, but that was like the worst junior high clique nastiness
I've ever seen, continued over several years.  

response 54 of 170:

Jan 8 16:20 UTC 2004

I can delete my posts. However, I am not staff, and I cannot delete 
the items that I have entered as other people have responded. I 
request staff to delete all my items. 

(I'm sorry I don't have a "resignation from staff" to offer in 
exchange for my items being deleted, but I figure "resigning" from 
grex itself should suffice.)

response 56 of 170:

Jan 8 16:26 UTC 2004

Since I'm a staff member, and expect to continue being a staff member, I guess
I need to state my position on all of this, so people will know where I stand.

My understanding of the policy on deletion of postings has been that people
were allowed to delete their own postings, but not those of others.  The
exception to this was that fairwitnesses where allowed to delete postings.
In the old days this had to be done to preserve disk space - fairwitnesses
would delete old items to make space for new ones.  Though technically
fairwitnesses could use this power to censor things they didn't like, that
his not historically been an approved practice, and I'd expect that any
fairwitness that did so would be removed.

Valerie didn't think that was the policy.  Apparantly there are other staff
members who didn't think so either.

The argument that she should have known otherwise because picospan didn't
let her do that kind of deletion from her own account isn't really very
good.  Picospan hasn't changed in a decade.  The rules it implements are
not identical to Grex's rules.  For example:

  (1) Given that willcome can establish that he really was polytarp, then
      I believe Grex's policies say that his postings as polytarp can be
      deleted upon request.  The software won't let him do it.  Grex staff
      would have to do it for him.

  (2) If someone posts a copy of your response in a literal quotation
      in their own resxponse, I believe you can have that deleted.  Again
      this requires staff action, and cannot be done via Picospan.

  (3) Though picospan allows fairwitnesses to delete any item from their
      conferences, the actual number of circumstances where this is
      approved of is narrow to the point of non-existance.  I'd say the
      only case would be if an item is being moved to a different conference -
      link it to the new conference and then delete it from the old, or
      if someone posted megabytes of garbage to an item.  Otherwise
      "retire" would always be prefered.

However, this is somewhat moot, because I'm pretty sure that if Valerie had
believed these to be the rules, she would have deleted the baby diary items
anyway (though she might have handled the whole thing a big differently).

I would not have done this myself, but I see the sense in her desire to do
so.  The fact is, this is not the same Grex it was five years ago.  What
seem reasonable and comfortable to put here then may well not seem reasonable
and comfortable now.

Joe desribes mynxcat as one of the trouble makers above.  I don't perceive
her exactly that way.  I see her as someone who has joined Grex recently and
thinks that they way things are is the way they are supposed to be.  Not an
unreasonable assumption.  She says things like "this is Grex - of course
you are going to be attacked if you say things like that."  Those of us who
have been here longer cringe at the statement.  That's not how the Grex
that we lived on for so long worked.  But it is how Grex works today.

Yes, there has always a steady steady stream of isolated twits wandering
around, being obnoxious.  But they where isolated idiots, easily ignorable
especially compared to the cohesive and supportive community that provided
a more positive response.

I think it is actually useful to look at the baby diary parody item on M-Net.
It is item 39 in the "agora" conference there.  You'll see a lot of rude
behavior that isn't really very different than things you've seen before.
But there is something I think is fairly new there.  You'll see people
pointing out to other people where they can find good stuff to attack.  For
years Valerie has occasionally commented that surprising people would
show up in the baby diary.  People who scarcely participated at all on
Grex, and who had no apparant interest in parenting.  Now she knows why
they were there.  They were there exclusively to find stuff that could
be taken back and parodied to the general applause of other people there,
or quoted verbatim and out of context to the comments like "Oh my god, I
can't believe she said that."

What that is, is not an occasional isolated twit, but a cohesive and self-
reinforcing community of twits, something rather harder to ignore.  Combine
that with the increased level of local twitiness, and the gradual erosion of
the more positive and supportive community that used to live here as people
are slowly driven away, and it's easy to see why some people might want to
re-evaluate the appropriateness of past posts.

Why delete the whole baby diary instead of only her posts to it.  Well, why
not?  Picture what the remaining item would look like if all of Valerie's
responses were gone.  The entire narrative thread would be gone.  What would
be left would be almost entirely commentary on it by other users.  If you
read it, you'd spend nearly all your time trying to infer what Valerie had
said from what other people were saying, with varying success.  In some
cases you'd guess right and in some cases you'd guess wrong.  It wouldn't
exactly be a precious jewel in the collection of great Grex items that
everyone would want to read.  All you'd really have left would be a sort
of distorted negative image of the diary.  Even without Valerie's responses,
it would still be all about Valerie.

This is quite different from jp2's request to delete his item requesting
a list of grex members.  With out jp2 it would still be about lists of grex
members.

Though it clearly makes little sense to want to keep Valerie's baby diary
without Valerie's responses around, I understand the reluctance of some people
to start getting into value judgements about what is and is not appropriate
to delete.  A nice clean rule that says people can only delete their own
responses is so very much simpler to administer.  On the other hand simple
rules are also very stupid sometimes.  In real life you do have to make
difficult judgements.

Personally, I'm conflicted about this.  I don't know what Grex's policy
should be.  I think it could bear some discussion.  It would certainly be
possible to get Valerie's baby diary items off a backup tape, delete all
of her text from them, and restore the sad remains to the parenting and
femme conferences.  It would be an amazingly stupid exercise, and rather
a Pyrrhic victory for those who want a hard line against censorship, but
it's certainly possible.  Incidentally, I'm not volunteering for the job.

I'm saddened by the whole thing.  Grex is still my primary social network.
To have Valerie out of it is a significant personal loss for me.

response 58 of 170:

Jan 8 16:47 UTC 2004

Thanks for responding, Jan.

response 60 of 170:

Jan 8 17:53 UTC 2004

Why do you feel a need to destroy everything you've contributed
to Grex, sapna?

response 62 of 170:

Jan 8 18:23 UTC 2004

I'd like to point out that my decision to remove everything had 
nothing to do with Valerie's actions. I was not trying to prove 
anything like if she can do it, so can I. I posted my response about 
leaving before reading ahead, and seeing her item about leaving the 
community. She has the Unix skills to script something to remove her 
comments. I'm not a Unix person, and I'll prolly do it manually, where 
I can. However, as I've stated, I'm unable to delete items that I've 
entered, nor the comments from the intl cf. 

"Why do you feel a need to destroy everything you've contributed
to Grex, sapna?"

I guess I want to disassociate myself from Grex as much as possible. 
Why it's important that everything I've contributed be deleted is hard 
to explain. I don't want my stuff around here anymore. I don't believe 
it belongs here.

(I realise I can't erase Grex completely from my life. That would mean 
getting rid of my Grex Mousepad that was a gift - and I can't part 
with gifts. I've made soem great friends, including Dan :). But I'd 
like to erase as much as possible)

response 64 of 170:

Jan 8 18:47 UTC 2004

Awww, thanks Sapna.