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Since a year or so, I get the feeling that the occasional bitterness I receive from StE starts to outweigh the joy of a rising reputation (people disliking old orthography and people defying the distinction between „im übrigen“ and „im Übrigen“, defying that the auditory value of Sauce differs from Soße and that I might even write „Quatsch mit Soße“, but „Sauce Hollandaise“ to distinguish the two, people disliking siezen, people disliking „Fräulein“...). It might be that these people are actually right considering the new times and I am just getting more and more eccentric and touchy. It might be better to leave the majority in peace to shape the community and the language as they please.

The easiest thing would be to delete one‘s profile, but as far as I know that would leave the answers still there for everyone to mess with, while I am no longer there to protect them. So, is there a way to delete everything other than going to each answer manually?

Thank you!

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  • Ich verstehe gut, dass du gemischte Gefühle, wenn ich das mal so umschreiben darf, gegenüber dieser Seite hast. Mich würde aber interessieren, was du genau mit people disliking siezen, people disliking „Fräulein“ meinst.
    – idmean
    Jul 17, 2018 at 13:34
  • @idmean es gibt Leute, die es nicht mögen, daß ich im Normalfall fremde sieze (auch wenn ich von ihnen nicht die gleiche Höflichkeit erwarte). Auch gab es mal Leute, die sich darüber ärgerten, daß ich einen Ersatz für Fräulein in der Gastronomie suche. Ich trauere -wohlgemerkt - Fräulein als allgemeiner Anrede nicht nach.
    – Ludi
    Jul 17, 2018 at 13:52
  • 2
    Es gibt Leute, die Antworten sinngemäß mit "ich habe keine Ahnung, aber...." einleiten, es gibt Leute, die Diskussionen vom Zaun brechen, anscheinend nur "damit was gesagt ist", und es gibt noch viele andere schräge Typen hier. Das ist aber noch lange kien Grund, alle Beiträge zu löschen und damit nützliche Wissenssammlungen zu zerstören (das ist irgendwie fast wie Bücher verbrennen). Das ist eher ein Grund, Größe zu zeigen und es mit der Eiche zu halten, die auch nicht reagiert auf die Wildschweine...
    – tofro
    Jul 19, 2018 at 22:17

2 Answers 2

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No there is no way to delete content once it was published.* Even revisions are there forever. We need this to be transparent. Nothing is hidden, all is open to the public.

By joining our community you agreed to this and that all content will be published under a creative commons license. You also agreed that people will be able to edit any of your content.

Mass-deleting your own content is considered as vandalism as it directly affects other people's interest and this will never be tolerated.

If you feel unhappy having your name attached to a post you can ask to have it disassociated. After you had decided to leave us (which I hope will never happen) your name will be replaced by a user#### default from all your posts (you can see that sometimes on posts from deleted user accounts)

Still, think about it. You contributed a lot. People loved you posts and they led to fruitful discussions.

We are quite a mixed community of all kinds of people from a 13 years old learner to retired people who spend their free time with the German language. We also have a wide range from of professional to laymen. All and everybody is welcome here, but then it is not to be expected that we all have the same goals, the same views, and the same love for our beautiful language.

But we try to work together to get solutions on language problems, to help people on issues while learning, an of course to learn about the history and the peculiarities of German. To make the world better.

We need you there!

Sadly we do need some rules but I hope we do not have too many of them. All our rules were created and are maintained and discussed by you, by the community. Everybody is invited to contribute on these discussions here on meta. Only rarely when it comes to basic principles of how the Stack Exchange Network works we will have to follow those rules set by the system.

I do hope you understand that nobody wants to force you into anything other than maybe a bit to stay, really.

*in rare cases (e.g. accidentally posted private information or other highly problematic content) we can request a complete removal but only of this part of a post. To do so flag a post for moderator attention and explain.

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I like to concentrate on the argument, why deleting your own content is considered as vandalism.

People write comments to improve answers and questions. If those posts would be deleted, their work would be deleted too.

People vote your answers and questions up and down. They read your texts and invested time and work in the review. This work would be wasted, if the post would be deleted.

People might have wanted to give the same answer you gave, but read yours and found it sufficient. Months and years later, they will probably not read the old question again to rewrite in their own words, what was deleted by you. Even if they do so, only few people might look at the old posting to vote these new answers up.

You gave 75 answers. If the system would support complete deletion and offer support of healing the holes, it would dump the 75 questions to the top.

The work of answering the 26 questions you wrote would be abandoned too, if the questions could be deleted. I don't see how the community could compensate that theoretically. Well, encouraging a rephrasing of the question and keeping the original available for doing so for a limited amount of time - but only to perform otherwise useless work?

The solution of anonymizing the author is imho a pretty good solution. If people mess around with your text, it is visible and your original is available via the edit history.

If you value the integrity of your texts very high, you may collect all your postings and publish them in parallel in a blog where nobody can mess around with them.

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