To preface none of my fellow admins know about this post due to the language that I am using.
Although I do believe that they would be supportive of this as they care about our users just as much as I do.

I just had a run in with a user asking for help who then deleted their post and comments soon after.

If you see any users asking for help I would personally recommend a couple of things to look out for:

  • Check their profile;
    • how old’s the account?
    • what kinds of posts and comments are they making?
      • Are they the kind of user you’d be cool with being friends with?
    • Do they have history of deleting posts/comments? If so why? and how often?
  • Check the modlog;
    • have they done or said anything that warrented themselves getting banned or their posts/comments removed?

I’m making this post as I’m personally frustrated seeing posts and comments being removed as it actively harms instances, communities, and most importantly users.

I absolutely despise when I go a saved post or comment thread that I wanted to reread later only to find that I can’t cause the post/thread’s been deleted by a single user.

There’s so much useful or interesting and creative things that people care about and also want to share in terms of life experiences or just having a cool thing to collaborate and work on.

  • having this be ruined by individuals that want to ‘dine and dash’ basically ruins this.

Honestly Fuck you.
If you ‘help farm’ especially I will find you and I will ban you because you are actively harming users who spend their precious time, effort, and humanly love to do cool stuff here on the Fediverse.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    9·
    20 days ago

    It’s a blunt instrument, but I’ve been temp-banning any new account that posts to any of the various “ask” communities. When I check back on them a few days later, 99% of them show up as “ERROR” when I view them on their home instance.

    The upside is that with them being banned at the time they nuke their accounts, the delete request is not accepted and the content/replies remain available.

    I’m to the point I’m considering patching the server to ignore federated account deletions since they’re being abused by a small number of people in a way that affects the majority of users.