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Sep 24, 2025 at 19:27 history edited BertholdStaffMod CC BY-SA 4.0
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Sep 1, 2025 at 12:34 comment added l4mpi I'm not talking about SE search, I'm talking about external search engines, and I remember at least one instance of finding a discussions post from a web search. Not sure if they also pulled indexing of those at some point.
Sep 1, 2025 at 12:14 comment added M-- @l4mpi this is not very constructive, nor nice, but anyway. They can delete and bring it back if they wanted. It's not like they won't have an archive for themselves. It also never polluted the search (well, after it was pulled from search very early on).
Sep 1, 2025 at 11:53 comment added l4mpi Then have fun looking at sewage I guess... but unlike real sewage I cannot think of any useful things you can do with the data (of course you can analyze it to death but to what end?). The "delete forever" part is definitely the important thing to me, not the acknowledgement - right now I'm happy that the trash is no longer on the site and no longer pollutes search results (which are already worse due to various other factors), and having it deleted on their end would mean there's no chance of any bright-eyed young PM resurrecting this garbage in the next "engagement" push.
Sep 1, 2025 at 11:41 comment added M-- @l4mpi there's not a single undeleted spam last I checked (and I checked frequently). A lot can be done with 'bad' data, and you can explore and see things/patterns even looking at literal sewage. Although, there are some (admittedly not many, but some) useful Discussions posts. In any case, I'd rather have an archive of something than hard-deleting it forever and ever. And honestly I wouldn't care about such acknowledgement (if I were in the same camp). It doesn't mean SO won't try to do similar things in the future, so it is as if I am looking for a hollow apology.
Sep 1, 2025 at 11:25 comment added l4mpi Why would you want such a dataset? From what I've seen of discussions, most of it would be spam, and the rest primarily useless chatter of the kind you can find on random programming reddits. Personally I'd love if they hard-delete all of it and acknowledge that it provided negative value.
Aug 31, 2025 at 20:59 comment added M-- And see No. 5 request here: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/432250 :)
Aug 31, 2025 at 19:05 comment added starball Mod related: Make Discussions posts available in SEDE
Aug 31, 2025 at 17:03 history answered M-- CC BY-SA 4.0