Deleting posts

[Nick Cox]

We seem to have had more requests or suggestions recently about deleting posts.

List policy is already explained at https://www.statalist.org/forums/help#closure

Here are some further comments:

Why would anyone want to delete a post? Some of the reasons I have heard:

1. I now have an answer, so you can delete the thread. Wrong: someone else may be interested in the thread. Also, you don't have a right to delete your posts and make the rest of the thread with other people's posts more difficult or impossible to follow. This misunderstands Statalist profoundly, as it is not a helpline but a discussion forum.

2. I am embarrassed by my question which now looks silly or trivial. Same comments as #1.

3. I was more irritated or ruder than I should have been and regret my post. The software allows you an hour to edit a post, which should cater for most such cases. Also, if anyone really was rude, someone else is likely to have noticed. StataCorp personnel occasionally edit posts in this way. (Of the order of once a year).

4. I have accidentally posted confidential data e.g. on patients. Use the CONTACT US button to contact StataCorp personnel who will be happy to edit posts under guidance.

[Jared Greathouse]

I felt a little silly when I posted this one since I thought of the answer literally 2 minutes after posting it, but that's totally okay. We're allowed to not know things, the important part is that I figured it out. We (most of us anyways) are academics after all, learning and not knowing stuff should be "our thing" if nobody else's.

Even though I look back and say "How didn't I see the answer to this before", that feeling lasted for 5 seconds and would be a terrible reason to delete the post. Plus, it could help anybody else aside from me who wanted to know how to generate a relative-to-event-time variable. If people were just allowed to pack their wagon up and delete answered questions, I would almost literally never have learned half the things I know about Stata now.