So in the past few months, on a very few rare occasions including once in the past day, we've had people request that their accounts be removed from these forums for some reason or another. It's usually because someone has gotten upset at something that someone else has said, or they posted something that caused a bit of a stir, or whatever. Just to head off any future cases of this happening, and to explain what will happen if it does, I wanted to post a message in regards to the issue.
First of all, if you want to go, you are more than welcome to. No one is forcing you to post here. Just because you have an account doesn't mean that you
must use it, and if you don't post anything, there's an
extremely high likelihood that no one will even notice that you're here. I can tell you that we don't do any datamining behind the scenes except on
very rare occasions when abuse has taken place, and only to do stuff like correlate IP addresses or other information to look for things like sockpuppet accounts. Since we don't run ads on the sites, we don't place any tracking cookies in your browers, and no information you give to us that's not publicly visible is available to any third parties behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, simply "deleting" an account is actually a little harder than it sounds. It's doable, but because accounts are synced up behind the scenes with our other sites (CIT, the Paragon Wiki, Faces, etc.) but "deletes" are only processed site-by-site, what this means is that you will cease to have a forum account but there will still be remnants of you in our system--remnants that means that if you later change your mind, you won't be able to re-create your account without a lot of time and effort on our part--time and effort that, frankly, we don't have time to be spending because someone has a thin skin.
So what I'm getting at is that if you want to go, and I mean you
really want to go, then we can make that happen. But let me be clear: If I spend the time and effort it takes to delete your account, I'm going to do it in such a way that you can't just change your mind later and come back. This also means that you won't be able to log into other sites such as the Paragon Wiki, CIT, Faces, etc. Maybe you think that's not such a big deal, but remember, just because the City of Heroes servers are down doesn't mean that
we are dead. We still have things such as the SaveCoH efforts going on, the Plan Z projects, and believe it or not, even an
interesting new project or two that might come down the pipeline yet.
Plus, some people keep trying to designate the Titan Network as a "single issue" site. We've been accused of basically being a front for a new Plan Z gaming studio. We've been accused of being only a mouthpiece of the SaveCoH movement. We've been accused of only serving to raise false hopes that CoH will be revived. So which are we? All of the above, and none of the above. We are simply a gathering place. Yes, we give an outlet for various groups to have publicity and congregate. And yes, some of us are personally involved in those groups. But if you think that the "Titan Network" is only out to put NCsoft out of business, or that the "Titan Network" is only out to push one successor project or another, or the "Titan Network" is only out to [insert whatever cause you think is being pushed here], you're sorely mistaken.
So I
highly advise you to reconsider your request before making it, and
highly encourage you to just stop posting in lieu or requesting a complete account deletion. Better yet, if you don't want to be associated with some plan or some movement or some group or whatever, just ignore them and focus on the other things here that you want to be involved in, even if it's just keeping touch with former players. But do NOT expect me or other Titan admins/moderators to go pushing other people out who don't fit the mold of whatever impression you have of people with "legitimate" opinions or motivations.
Now, about what set all of this brouhaha off. Apparently, someone takes exception to some opinions held by others posting here on our forums. I'm not going to delve into the argument or who's right or who's wrong because it's not important. What I will say is this, though: It would behoove everyone to stop trying to interpret our unwillingness to constantly moderate contrary or even unpopular opinions as implicit approval or endorsement of those opinions.
You have to understand that since the official forums are down, a huge number of former players have now migrated here. As such, just as we had on the official forums, we have a
lot of people with a
lot of opinions that hold them to a
lot of varying degrees. Just as on the official forums how Zwillinger, Freitag, and Hit Streak didn't jump on the banhammer button every time someone posted something "out there", we're not going to do that here. It doesn't mean that we're sitting here saying, "YES!!! That's EXACTLY how I feel!" (we'll actually say that if we feel it). Frankly, I don't read most of the posts here and if it weren't for our awesome crew of moderators, people would probably get away with a lot more stuff. It also doesn't mean we won't moderate the forums at all; we do look out for things such as people unicorning, personally attacking other members, engaging in things like racial, ethnic, or sexual orientation slurs, threats, and so on. But you must understand that "troll" does NOT mean "person who disagrees with you."
Where is the line drawn? Well, it's one of those things that we know when we see it, and in the interest of not being rules-lawyered to death, I'm not going to set out hard and fast rules here. But just in case it wasn't obvious when you came here to begin with, sometimes people are going to say stuff that you don't like, and it's not going to measure up to our standard of being so offensive or trollish that we feel the need to squelch conversation about the topic. Welcome to a more-or-less open forum of ideas of discussion! On the flip side, it means that there's a chance that we actually don't agree with
you, but we're still letting you say your piece anyway. See how nice we are?
We've also received requests to delete posts or even whole threads and taken steps to restore such posts when someone took initiative on their own to do so. We've disabled that functionality because we felt it was abused. The thing is, when you post something, you're are setting up a context in which discussion happens. At that point, especially after other people have started commenting, even if you originally posted the comment, it is no longer truly 100% yours but instead part of the public discourse. By systematically wiping out such posts, the context in which they were posted is lost, discussion about various topics is gone, and worst of all, there is the risk that people think that
we instigated the removal of the posts when in fact we didn't. So just like above, I'm not going to make a hard-and-fast rule saying we'll always delete such-and-such or never delete so-en-so. If you request it, we'll discuss it and make a decision on a case-by-case basis. I can tell you that we will hardly ever honor any kind of request such as, "Delete everything I've ever posted!" because that's simply unreasonable, and I can tell you that it will probably take at least a day or two for us to ponder the situation and figure out how we want to handle it. If you expect us to jump through hoops five minutes after you tell us something, you're going to be sorely disappointed and you shouldn't have posted it in the first place.
I hope this clarifies things a bit, and I'm sorry I had to distract everyone in taking the time to say it.