The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

[tst]

While my interest in those specific documents is practically zero, I definitely agree with the others that deleting old content is a bad move in general, and I particularly disagree with the "clean out old documents that are no longer deemed useful to the majority of our users" concept. Even if the documents are not useful for the majority of the users, I think the onus is still on NI to at least keep existing links working and also to think about the minority of the users who will find the documents useful. This isn't just relevant to coding challenges, but to all content.

[Ben]

Yes, in the modern era of electronic sharing of info, deleting old posting and contributions is similar to buring old books just because nobody has checked them out recently. Libraries maintain "stacks" for old books that are not read often.

The implications for the community are also affected by this stand to delete old stuff.

Some of us (well maybe just me) have this crazy idea that their contributions will out live them and serve the developers of tommorow.

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?

Ben

[Hooovahh]

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@Ben wrote:

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?

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What if every post in the forums with zero kudos was deleted after some amount of time?  I realize NI probably tries to gauge what is useful to users other than just a kudo count, but still I think the comparison is apt.

Well if you're ever looking for another LabVIEW community to share and help with there's always the largest independent LabVIEW community over on LAVA   We've only ever had one large purge in our history that I know of, and it was due to a big server crash, where the way to recover the majority of the data, was through a program that went through someones backed up RSS feed, and reposted the content.

[Ben]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

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@Ben wrote:

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?

---

What if every post in the forums with zero kudos was deleted after some amount of time?  I realize NI probably tries to gauge what is useful to users other than just a kudo count, but still I think the comparison is apt.

Well if you're ever looking for another LabVIEW community to share and help with there's always the largest independent LabVIEW community over on LAVA   We've only ever had one large purge in our history that I know of, and it was due to a big server crash, where the way to recover the majority of the data, was through a program that went through someones backed up RSS feed, and reposted the content.

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Prior to that Michael pulled a stunt where he was claiming that LAVA was going to be shutdown. I imediately went to every post in the scripting thread and saved everyone to my machine.

Ben

[X.]

I think NI's move should be commended. Think of all the space that could be recovered in libraries if we followed the same guidelines...

There are so many Middle Age calligraphed manuscripts that nobody ever bothers to read, ancient works of science from time immemorial which almost nobody can decipher, literature work of evil, crazy or plain fanatical men and women, etc... Let's clean the whole thing up!

[Hooovahh]

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@X. wrote:

I think NI's move should be commended. 

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I think you forgot this

/s

[Ben]

If they wanted to save space, just use a smaller font.

Be thankful they were not the people that found the rotsetta stone.

Ben

[Hooovahh]

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@Ben wrote:

Be thankful they were not the people that found the rotsetta stone.

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Or maybe they were, but all record of their discover was lost 

[Matt_McLaughlin]

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@Ben wrote:

The implications for the community are also affected by this stand to delete old stuff.

Some of us (well maybe just me) have this crazy idea that their contributions will out live them and serve the developers of tommorow.

Why bother putting any effort into contributions if we know NI is going to blow it away in a couple of years.

So is that REALLY the message NI want to send?

Ben

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Hi Ben,

I wanted to quickly jump in on this comment.

We will not simply remove content that community members have contributed. In cases of SPAM or inappropriate conduct, we contact users directly notifying them that the content was remove, often "archiving" the content in case of error (the only exception being obviously bot-generated SPAM). If at any point in the future community content needs to be moved or altered, we will communicate that well in advance.

I believe the mixup here is that the removed content pre-dated our Community system, was categorized as an NI managed tutorial (presumably the best options available at the time), and was treated by automated tools as such.

I know this is a bit of an aside to the conversation about this specific document, but I wanted to make sure that point was clarified.

Moving forward, I would love it if we could have a more formalized, regular Coding Contest process hosted on the Community with some sort of archive/hall-of-fame for past winners.

Thanks,

[Ben]

It is good to hear that we can nip that idea in the bud.

Thank you.

Ben