I don't know why I deserve an opinion here but here's my take:

3 Possibilities
1) She lost her account credentials to someone. I think this is very unlikely because of the result - who would hack an account and delete everything? Not saying I would do this, but I'd expect them to spam and do bad stuff, not delete everything.

2) Someone in real life found this and confronted her about it. This may seem strange to people, but  for me, I dislike people in real life making connections to my online profiles. I do act a little different online that I do offline, and I say different things and act a little differently - I think we all do. Some people like keeping that distance, which is why if I make an account name I try to have 3 to 5 different ones so that people can't make those connections. So maybe someone found it and connected it to her and she was embarrassed.

3) She had a large emotional problem or sudden issue in her life that emotionally devastated her and her gut reaction against the forum (which, in her partaking of it, could have caused the problem or not) was to delete all her posts and get away.

Personally I think it was inappropriate but we can't know without context. I wish her posts were still here though - old threads are going to be really confusing because she posted pretty often...

Her Lang-8 and smart.fm accounts were similarly changed, so it was nothing against this forum. She is having some kind of emotional crisis most likely to have put so much effort into erasing her online footprints.  I Googled her real name and the only pages that come up are of her apprenticeship in Nagoya.

I don't think she used her real name on those accounts.  I have it from exchanging emails with her.

Guess we just have to wait and see what really happened.

Tzadeck wrote:

Ryuujin27 wrote:

I can't believe I just read every post without skipping from start to finish in a 3+ page thread. I never do that. My attention span is no where near that level.

Must be the drama.

I think she was one of the forum celebrities--this is like a silly gossip show.

Anyway, I e-mailed her, I'll let people know if I get a response.  I imagine other people who also had her e-mail gave it a shot too.

gossip shows are really bad...

Icecream... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Just got an email from IceCream. She's fine and her account wasn't hacked. Just fancied a new beginning. I believe she'll be in discussion with ファブリス about getting unbanned.

Bokusenou wrote:

For me, it was her 1000 card drama Anki Deck. I'm not even into dramas (more of an anime/movie/novels person), but I loved it every time I used that deck because it was just so well put together, more so than some other pre-made media decks I've seen.

Googlecache of the drama deck

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s … ogle.co.uk

Good to know she's ok, though honestly I find the idea of her getting unbanned and coming back a bit strange; what's the point of leaving the forum in such a dramatic fashion (and in such a destructive way for the community), only to start browsing/posting again 1 week later?!

Blahah wrote:

Just got an email from IceCream. She's fine and her account wasn't hacked. Just fancied a new beginning. I believe she'll be in discussion with ファブリス about getting unbanned.

Well she wanted to leave the past identity behind, didn't she?

I don't really fancy writing an email right now.

Maybe I don't get the whole online community thing but I think she's put in way more than she's taken away.

Anyway, glad she's okay and hope she comes back as her posts were easily some of the most interesting and useful for me.

I think it would make sense to let you have full control over your posts for a certain amount of time after posting it.  After a few hours or a day has passed then the post is locked and you can't change it any further.

I'm not really sure how much work this would be for ファブリス though.  So it's all up to him.

thecite wrote:

Seems rather selfish to be honest; taking away so much from the community.

I'm annoyed more for my own selfish reasons. She's one of the few genuine AJATT success stories on this site; went from almost zero Japanese to being able to get a research position in Japan in less than two years. She made some bold claims (learning all Core 6000 vocab words in 4 weeks, being able to understand most dramas after 6 months) but she was able to back it all up with excellent written output (she kept a japanese blog on lang-8).

Now the cool thing was, she documented pretty much every step, hence I bookmarked many of her threads..if you were to follow anyone's path to fluency, it would be hers..

Tzadeck wrote:

Do you mean you're thinking about whether it's a good idea to unban her or not?  I think that she's contributed enough to this forum to be forgiven for this--especially because it's really just that she has a different opinion on ownership of posts.

This is where I take issue; she owns her posts, but not really the threads that other people have contributed to.

If she wanted to delete posts that contain personal information or views, absolutely understand that. If she wanted to delete threads she made containing useful information about studying - again, ok (though a bit frustrating).

But deleting posts where large numbers of people have replied, for example the Ask Magamo thread, is not really on, as they have put considerable effort into replying not just for her but for everyone on this site to read. For her to assume that ruining those threads wouldn't matter to anyone else here is pretty short-sighted and selfish.

ファブリス wrote:

Though, I would actually be fine with just leaving the delete feature on all the time--it's unlikely that many people will go crazy with the feature like Icecream did.  I mean, even if deleting wasn't an option, she could have just edited all her posts to say nothing.  It doesn't seem like removing the feature is solving the problem.

I'm strongly in favour of removing the delete/edit feature. Most forums disallow because it's open to so much abuse, and creates a culture where posters don't have to take responsibility for what they're writing.

If you want to retract something you have said, make a follow up post and say why; you shouldn't just be allowed to change history and pretend you never said it!

Last edited by aphasiac (2011 February 09, 7:09 pm)

Mcjon01 wrote:

caivano wrote:

Maybe I don't get the whole online community thing but I think she's put in way more than she's taken away.

Seems to me like she's taken away exactly as much as she put in.  Isn't that the point of this thread?

I was going to expand on the comment but then I was too lazy :$ But it's along the lines of most forum post being most useful at the time of posting rather than later on. When you give someone advice or make a comment, if the person / people the post is intended for reads it then the job of the post is done. So if you take the post away later it doesn't really matter. I see the fact that other people later on can read the post as a kind of bonus rather than the point.

Some people create posts like that are like references so I guess these are different. But it's still something they have created. So when they withdraw that info even if people in the future can't read it, the knowledge gained by people who read it before still exists (giving the creator a huge knowledge given over knowledge taken ratio)....

this makes sense in my head anyway