Notes From a Publisher: AFP - Miss a Day, Miss a Lot

Wow. What a day. Being a modern publisher sure isn't easy work - especially since I'm not really doing it full time. Yes, I do a lot of freelancing to pay the bills. Anyway, I feel bad for not being at the school board meeting tonight. I thought about it, but the work involved was a lot - to do a video and what-not. (And yet here I am wasting time writing a blog post, right?) Some days it seems like you can never win or get ahead.

I believe in what I'm doing, or trying to do, though. And that makes it all a little bit easier. I really felt a need to stop what happened earlier and sit down and write something out trying to explain. I guess maybe CC-Gal got me to thinking that I handled it the wrong way. I don't see removing that as back pedaling, though. Because AFP is a thriving, living organism - you miss a day, you miss a lot. 

And you guys - the people FORMERLY known as the audience, the readers - you're what makes it tick. Don't think for a moment that I don't realize that. And I guess I'm really open here on the site - personally even. And that's one of the reasons AFP (imho) offers so much more value (for the money) than the HB currently does. 

Ok, let's talk about the content you post here. If you read most agreements for the large sites (Gannett, etc.), once you post, the companies pretty much own them lock stock and barrel. There are no ways to delete. That's right. I was very, very liberal with the ability to delete content here at AFP. (And it burned me, I guess. Live and learn.) The big corporations, though, the other websites, they have agreements that state they own your content after you post it. 

I want to know what you guys think. Nothing at AFP is written in stone at the moment when it comes to this. Remember, though, that most other sites don't even make this a consideration. You may be able to delete the account, but the content you created with it stays. 

So, if you want the ability to delete everything you've posted here at AFP (take your ball and go home), I'll need to take time to program a neat/clean way to do this WITHOUT losing a lot of data from other members at AFP - all out conversations are weaved together. I shoulda given people the ability to EDIT their own posts, but not DELETE them. Lesson learned. It was a zinger, too.

Seriously, though, let's have a discussion about this. Say someone says they want all their content deleted, the button is pressed and they're wiped from AFP's history, then the next day they change their mind. What then? 

To be honest, I'm leaning toward going with most other online publishers in saying that once it's here it's here - or maybe you can edit the comments out one by one, but not delete them along with other comments/threads/memes/etc. Sigh. The Internets are so complicated these days. Smile. That's one reason I love my job, though.

And you guys - the people here. You make me mad, you make me happy, you make me sad, you make me feel the whole range of human emotions. And that's a wonderful think. Thanks for letting me be part of that process.

The decision is going to come down to me, of course, but I want to open up the discussion about the content you post here at AFP. Should I make it like other mainstream sites or a little looser? 

Please be respectful in this thread and limit it to the discussion at hand.

Thanks.