I hate there are limits on everything

@Andrew the new quotas are nice, but that isn't what the OP brought up. Only being able to delete x number of posts, comments, or anything else until a certain amount of time passes is one of the things about SW that makes no sense at all. Why do you hold user's content hostage like that, and make people jump through hoops to delete things, and delete things one by one rather than in batches (like a "Select all" checkbox at the top of a column of individual checkboxes, like in Gmail), and limit us to being able to only delete a few items per hour/day, one at a time, after having to go to each individual item, and then navigate back to the list of items (for instance, comments)?

There's not even an option to just mass delete everything, in one easy step (after confirmation of course) you ever wrote or uploaded here when you want to delete your account.

It seems like you are very strongly trying to discourage people from deleting anything, when other sites do not antagonize users that way. I don't know how it could be unintentional, because multiple people have mentioned this multiple times over a long period of time.

Sometimes (not all of the time of course), it seems like the admins do not hear or do not want to hear user feedback, and/or do not want to be transparent about the reasons things like these deletion limits are in place, because they immediately start talking about Y, when the users brought up X, and the admins never address X. It's a complete change of subject.

@SW-User
Yes, We understand this.

However, the OP did also explicitly state:

They are two separate (but related) issues, and we have made improvements with the last release, to address and alleviate one of those issues.

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The reasoning for certain decisions may not always be obvious to all users.

It is a Very Common occurrence for users to request of Admins (as busy as we are):


It is Very Common for users to make certain exaggerated actions that they may soon regret and wish to be undone, due to being in a temporary state of unrest or instability.

These actions are not always reversible (while the content is in the process of being purged),
and it costs SW Staff a great deal of work and time, which could be spent on other more urgent issues.


The Limits on certain actions also is a security and anti-abuse measure, for cases such as:
- An account being Hacked
- An account being Misused by someone whom it was given access to
- A user maliciously trying to Overload our Servers, by making too many simultaneous, massive, repetitive actions
...etc.

@PamperedHeart
I explained several reasons as to why that is (the Cons of Uncontrolled Bulk Actions), in my last comment.

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• Creating a New Post = 1 Chain of Multiple Actions/Queries/Processes
• Uploading a New Image = 1 Chain of Multiple Processes
• Posting 1 Comment = 1 Chain of Multiple Processes
• Liking 1 Comment = 1 Chain of Multiple Processes
• Deleting 1 Image = 1 Chain of Multiple Processes

• Deleting 1000 Images = 1000 Chains of Multiple Processes (an Exponential amount of Strain on Servers)


Apart from the other legitimate reasons given,
allowing any user to create too many chain processes on our server from a singly Bulk action initiated by them, can quickly overload our servers.

Some malicious users can even utilize such a weak point as a Server Attack / DDOS.


Even for companies as big as Facebook/Meta who has almost "endless resources",
there is good reason why Exporting of one's Account Data can take Hours/Days to complete.

BULK actions cause an exponential increase of interconnected processes to take place on a server in a very short time-frame, which can cause server overload, potential data-loss, etc..

These things always need to be handled with care, and limits need to be put in place, in proportion to ones server capabilities.

@Andrew yet I can delete 100 Gmail emails at a time by clicking a single check box (or all the emails in the current older, if they span more than one list page of emails) by clicking a different option

And I don't have to manually go inside of each email to delete it, I can do it directly from the list of emails ... it's just simple checkboxes

Similarly functionality exists in Google Drive

You already store deleted stuff for six months (a cooling period for people who are having a bad day when they delete stuff), so users being babysat, and streamlining the deletion process are not mutually exclusive goals at all.

And if somehow a hacker gets into my account, and permanently deletes my stuff a little at a time, that deletion will suck as much as if they could just permanently delete everything in one go, so the distinction doesn't matter that much.


So is this really the heart of the matter? You just lack the server resources of Gmail and Google Drive?

You can't let a bulk deletion request be a request for a place in an automated job queue (and optionally send a user a notification 10 minutes later or whatever, that the job completed)?

If anything, throttle that job queue, after a user has initiated the bulk action request in a less burdensome request-making interface. Don't throttle the interface.


Which is why people ask you about those. Maybe you need to add such answers to the FAQ if the same questions come up over and over. These posts and comment threads that may get buried or deleted aren't great for archiving such answers that go beyond the basic "How do I delete a photo?" sort of thing that is in (and kind of buried in) the Help/FAQ section already (see the below sample search).

https://similarworlds.com/help/?search=delete

@SW-User


1) Email Services use a completely different data structure and queries to that of Social Networks.

2) Google likely is in the Top 10 list of having the most Server resources.

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Email = 1-to-1 Communication

Social Network = Network / Exponential Signals


With Social Networks for example, each piece of content or action taken, is tied to a cascade of various other actions and data-points.

One very simple action can be tied to many larger processes/calls:

1 Comment ->
-> Log Activity
-> Is Comment Valid / Spam / Hack?
-> Log Edits
-> Check Level of Subscription
-> Decide who gets Notified
-> Decide if/when to Notify owner of interactions
-> Decide whether an Email Notification should be Sent, based on:
--- User Settings
--- Volume of Recent Emails Received
-> Decide if the Comment should appear in Feeds, and to Whom
-> If Qualifies, Check if User is Blocked or Muted, to Hide Comment
-> Log Interactions on Comment
-> Repeat Loop of Processes on each Interaction made on the Comment
... and so on... (incomplete)

@Andrew I understand what you are saying. Could you not still provide an interface to select all (whatever the limit is, say, 25 items on one page in a list of one's replies in x number of pages of lists) ... even if it takes the server 24 hours or 7 days to sort through all of these steps after we submit the request? I mean the one of us making multiple requests, whether having to do it one at a time or 25/100 at a time ... and processing those requests seems like two separate steps to me, unless I am missing something

@SW-User
Thanks for all the feedback, and we will take note of this, and will look into this further.
(We are still in the middle of developing a lot of new features, improvements, and attending to pending user requests).


Apart from the potential load on our servers, we had mentioned the situation of users very regularly asking us to restore their Photos / Messages / Account, shortly after deleting them.

It's easy for people sometimes, to want to "Delete Everything" after a bad interactions / experience on a website,
then once they get over the initial emotional period, they come to realize that the incident is not that big of a deal, and certainly not worth deleting all their data over.

(Which can then cause us SW Staff, additional work in having to deal with non-stop data restoration requests, which we cannot always fulfill.)


In our experience, the vast majority of users who at some point wished to "Delete all Photos", changed their mind afterwards, and after some days, continued to use the site as usual, being content that they didn't delete it all.


I do still understand where you are coming from
(and that it can seem a bit unfair to not simply provide every option that users request).

Its sort of a weighing of Pros and Cons, I guess.


For now, because of the tremendous amount of workload we have, distributed between x2 Admins,
to be able to handle all critical requests, user conflicts and development tasks,
we have to lean towards, at times, the options that do not add further workload to our plates.