One of things that we discovered after migrating to the new platform was that private messages that had previously been "deleted" showed up again. That was an area of the site that I made sure migrated but I didn't test terribly deeply because, though I am the admin and have access to anything that is shared here, I've always made it a policy to stay out of other people's PMs.
The new PM system is a work in progress. It behaves mostly like the old version and shares a similar data structure, which is how the old messages could be migrated here, but it doesn't have a complete implementation of message deleting yet. As we discovered, in the old system when a PM was deleted it was simply marked deleted, not actually removed from the database. Here even that isn't working yet.
I've spent a bit of time trying to see if I could fix this. It will get fixed, eventually, but it isn't a trivial amount of work and not something I can promise to deliver any time soon. But the more I thought about it, the more I think the immediate solution is to just clear out old PMs and have a fresh start.
My reasoning is that PMs are private conversations and meant to be ephemeral, more like SMS messages than public postings. Nobody intended for them to be held here forever. Little backs and forths, presumably some exchanges of personal contact information, perhaps a few snarky comments or inappropriate jokes. It doesn't really matter what's in them; they weren't intended to hang around forever. I'd like to purge them and start fresh.
I'm thinking that on February 1 I will delete all existing PMs and PM threads.
When I scrolled back through my PMs I got a bit nostalgic, finding conversations I'd forgotten about from site members who've moved on, as well as a few who've passed away. There are a handful of conversations and tips I'll copy and archive locally, but I personally couldn't find anything that I felt needed to stay on the webserver indefinitely. I'm hoping that giving you all a couple of weeks to peruse your archives will offer you plenty of time to back up anything you want to hang onto before I clear it out.
I will retain an offline back up for a few months afterwards, too, so if suddenly someone discovers they lost something precious in the purge I will be able to recover it. For a while.
If this is going to be a problem for anyone, please let me know.
Thank you for giving us plenty of notice. I have things I want to save and archive, and it may take some panning to find the gold nuggets with all the deleted stuff mixed back in. But you're right, it is nice to revisit some of the old conversations.
Best,
dw
I had no idea I had had such a PM history. Reading through a bunch of my PM's was actually rather heart-warming. None of them have information that is in any way valuable, but the collection reminded me of wonderful relationships among TFL members I had over the years.
I was also reminded of some breads I baked once of twice then forgot about. I must revisit some of those!
David