It's been about 8 years & there's still no way to edit/delete your own dang-diddly comments?

It's been over 13 years. Was never planed.

Unscrupulous people might take advantage of this to strain our system unless we put time limits and character limits on it. That's work though and lozer/Geltas have more important things to do.

^I can get editing, but deleting comments puts a strain on the system? Wouldn't editing forum posts do the same thing again?


I've done that more than I care to admit.

Just from personal observation there's a lot more comments per day than forum posts. That probably plays a role in strain on the system.

I wish I'd known it was possible to report comments for deletion a few days ago when I accidentally made a double comment. (First one seemed to fail because I received a mail message while submitting, but actually succeeded and I didn't notice until I resubmitted it after marking the mail read.)

The problem with deleting comments was more the fact that once a comment was deleted it was completely *gone*. There was no record left whatsoever, no way for us to find it and do anything about it. This meant that if people could delete their own comments, they could use them for unscrupulous things, such as the things that they were using the mail system for that led to us banning an entire category of content from the site, and we wouldn't even know that it happened. Editing comments has the same problem. The way the comment system is set up, there is no way to keep a history of previous versions of a comment, and adding both that and an endpoint for staff to see the previous versions isn't worth the effort.

Proofread your comments before posting them. If you find out something in your comment was factually incorrect, you can post a comment correcting it. If you realize later that you regret posting a comment, take it as a learning experience not to post comments like that online in the future. After all, you should think of anything you post online as permanent. Even if you delete it, there's a good chance that it's been cached on some server somewhere forever.

I still find it kind of surreal that people would be/were exchanging highly illegal and damning criminal evidence (ie: the type of thing you get homicide level prison time for) on a clearnet anime website, to the point where many of said website's policies have had to be tailored to avoid that very thing.

i wanna assume it was mainly people who thought the internet was still some new and mysterious frontier who also didn't understand using the deep web

Probably. What Jerl mentioned about the permanence of everything you put on the internet is true; it's likely a lack of understanding that from less technically literate people that leads them to share illegal things in broad daylight like that (in the same vein that I've seen people advertise that they're buying hard drugs on social media).

Well, that got dark.

Nah, it's simply idiots, or if you prefer the "low hanging fruit" of that criminal type. They're the type that ends up arrested and in the news when there are big busts of dark web sites, because they didn't take all the necessary precautions. (Like using a no-logging VPN with an Internet kill switch on top of using Tor. If they don't, and law enforcement takes control of a site and adds malicious code it's possible for LE to force said code to communicate with a server under their control over clearnet, logging the person's real IP.)

That's also why I'm never all that impressed with LE trumpeting about their latest take-down of a dark web site. They only get the easy targets, not the really dangerous people who are smart enough to take all the necessary precautions. That makes the trumpeting PR more than anything. (In a "see, we're doing something!" sense.) Often if you dig up the actual numbers you'll see why, stuff like 30,000 accounts but they arrested 1,000 people or less. That's less than 1%, but they act like they got them all.

Sorry for the divergence there, it's a pet peeve of mine. I want LE to stop the PR nonsense and focus on the hard work of catching the real dangerous criminals, instead of easy PR wins.