Work keeps me quite busy. I honestly would have tried giving it a go if not.
Hope someone else is inspired to.
That’s fine, but don’t tell me to do more privacy work for free just because I’m already doing some! 
Like you, I have a job, and I have a family. Life is busy.
I’m not telling you. I was only suggesting. Geez, you read that wrong.
My hunch regarding tech news delays is this forum likely wants less rushed, clickbait news and more information before it spreads panic.
Like that 404media article recently about “Proton helping the FBI”, which mislead a lot of people to think Proton was corrupt or lying about their service integrity, and their CEO made a statement to try and correct the nonsense.
Reddit took that headline and swayed a lot of people away from Proton, but it faired better here as people actually read the article. I do think that article was posted quickly on the PG forum, but there are plenty of other sites where I get hysteria via “breaking news”. I’d rather a bit more thoughtful information here, which means slower news updates.
Idk, this is just my guess. I usually get my breaking tech news from my RSS feed, and then discuss here later.
As someone who has, in the past, moderated a small online community (at the request of the community owner), I have immense appreciation, empathy, and sympathy for moderators of any online community (including Privacy Guides).
I do still think there are some things in the Privacy Guides community that could use some clarity, and some improvements that could be made, but we should go about this in a respectful and civil manner.
You copied pasted an entire article… of course the mods are going to take it down. They don’t want to get DMCAd.
Off-Topic I guess: „They don‘t wanna get DMCAd“
Just want to say that this depends on the article and this does not apply always — if the website didn‘t had some noarchive/noindex tag in the robots.txt, they implicitly consented to have copies of them floating around in the internet. That‘s the legal foundation out of which the Internet Archive and similar organizations do their job.
Still Offtopic
A. Thank you for this very detailed and good explanation why “Not how that works in the slightest“.
B. Yeah then in this case it might’ve reasonable to take the post down.
Still, your post is inaccurate and/or misunderstandable, that was why I wrote the reply. And yes, that is how that can work and in fact how it even DID work in the past. WebCite - Wikipedia
That’s regarding snapshots/caching of a site. The user did not link to the internet archive or other cached copy. He copied and pasted the text directly from the site into a new post.
As much as I find this side discussion around DMCA/”Copying and pasting whole articles” interesting I am not sure it really pertains to the main focus of this topic. That main focus being:
and discussion around:
I’m in no way trying to “end” this side conversation, and y’all are welcome to continue it in DM’s or a separate topic, I just want to keep this main topic fairly orderly and on topic.
When I added this link I forgot that I’m a paying subscriber to Firewalls, which means I get bonus interview content. Some of the points I referred to are in that section. Sorry if that caused confusion. I usually listen to the bonus content right after the main interview, so I think of these as one whole.
Thanks @win11.shading291 for making me aware of this!
No problem, I listened to the whole thing wanting an answer from the PG team on moderation, but it wasn’t there, so I was disappointed once again.
There has been no change so far, as far as I can see. Threads keep getting shadow deleted.
I’ve also personally held off my participation here because of this fiasco. Becoming more of a lurker now.
All in all disappointing.
I’ve been stewing on this for a while as well. Was gonna message directly staff about it in at the few months mark, but I was beat to the punch. I’m operating under the assumption that it’s just how it is.
Don’t really feel like rocking the boat on something that can’t or is too slow to react, so just gonna focus on reading mostly.
As someone who has, in the past, moderated a small online community (at the request of the community owner), I have immense appreciation, empathy, and sympathy for moderators of any online community (including Privacy Guides).
Based on past experiences, I can say admining a mid sized politically tinted forum is hardcore mode. It makes it hard for me resent mods anywhere. There’s always part of me that thinks, “Well, it’s not like I’m going to moderate this thing.”
I rather find privacy guides to be more like a master class of respectful communication, especially in official privacyguides.org content, but really in general. I would love to do that well in other aspects of my life.
Not to say people can’t request clarity or that mistakes don’t get made- they do by anyone- but it would be good for forum members to have in mind what goes into a forum like this. 100% transparency or consistency is not going to be possible for every mod action. Otherwise the forums would be overrun with spam and flaming whilst mods engage in constant internal discussions and moderation press briefings.
Nobody asked for that.
It’s pretty unanimous though that nobody want thread shadow deleted one month after creation with no reason provided. But it’s more then that.
I’d encourage you to read the locked thread referenced in this topic: Forum Moderation
That is a very long thread. I read some of it. I haven’t experienced what you all have described and have no issue with someone wishing to know why their thread was deleted. My staying out of that is intentional.
I have experienced, for example, the challenge of making consistent thread by thread judgements in highly subjective situations while working as part of a team where each member brings their own perspective, all while balancing not discrediting the mod team with not alienating users. It’s not an easy at all, especially when new spam and flamimg continues to come in and offline life continues to make demands. I also often had actions related to offline events interpreted as a part of a response to a user.
This doesn’t mean I’m taking a position on what you should ask for or that I’m aligning myself in an interpersonal conflict. Take it as sharing what I wouldn’t know if my life had gone a bit differently. If that’s unhelpful, I apologize. Feel free to ignore me.
This thread is mostly dead at this point, and I don’t really intend to revive it since it has become clear that it will be ignored by Privacy Guides staff/forum moderators.
However I would still like to document my frustration here that when one user’s comment is deleted for being off topic or otherwise against forum guidelines a user which had replied to the post in question will often (if not always) not receive any kind of notification that their comment has also been deleted.
I understand why these replies end up deleted as I imagine it would be difficult to keep replies to a comment even after that parent comment has been deleted vs simply deleting the comment in question and any dependent replies below it.
Notably this is not an issue when a post has simply been hidden by community flags, since in that case the post technically still exists, so dependent replies do not need to be deleted/dealt with, but the post would then only be visible to mods or staff.
Not being notified of post deletion leaves users under the assumption that their previous statements are still publicly visible, thus potentially causing an unnecessarily confusing thread. Further no notification means users are not properly signaled to that they have an opportunity to, and should, rewrite their old reply in compliance with the forum guidelines if they do not wish the contents of that reply to be lost from the conversation.
I am taking PG’s lack of response to mean: love it or leave it because it is what it is. For all the transparency and the chest thumping they are about given the open source nature of the website and community engagement and consensus through which they claim to operate, this is disappointing.
So, it’s up-to us to decide where we want to be to discuss all things privacy and cybersecurity. As is for all the digital tools and services we use. Choose the one that respects you. Pay with your attention and wallet and in this case, engagement on here.
Yeah, I’ve come to a similar conclusion myself, and it is “disappointing” considering how Privacy Guides positions itself so strongly as transparent and community built.
I would have left this forum some time ago if not for the value actually brought by the community here in various discussions. However my enthusiasm around being here and subsequent activity in this community has generally decreased thanks to situations like these.