I have been uploading comic art images by Moebius for several weeks almost daily to the !eurographicnovels@lemm.ee community, where I´m a moderator myself. All those images have disappeared. Modlog says the images have been deleted by “admin”. Modlog gives no reason for this but says the images were later restored by “admin” but that is not true. All my comic art posts have been destroyed and are empty posts now. I was not even contacted a single time about this and honestly can´t think of a reason because I had uploaded exclusively “safe for work” and apolitical material. We are trying to build a community for european graphic novels like “Tintin”, “Lucky Luke” and “The Incal” and I put a lot of love in those posts because I want to help make our community interesting and grow. However - I have been stongly discouraged to contribute content now that I have seen it gets arbitrarily wiped by anonymus admins. How can I find out what happened, who deleted my stuff and why they did so? How can I avoid this happeing to my posts in the future?
It looks like a lot of mistakes were made in your case. I saw your posts asking about dialogue and such. I’m surprised no one has reached out to you because, speaking for myself, when I remove something and give an explanation in the modlog and I’m asked more questions by message, I always reply and explain myself. I’m sure someone will interact with you if you send an admin a message. I looked at the log and it looks like a script or other automated action is to blame. The admin actually caught the issue and tried to restore your posts. It also looks like it was a “suspected spam” type of deletion that was corrected. I understand your irritation. I wouldn’t want to be in your situation because you took lots of time to add content to a community you care about. However, it looks like one of those things we call an “honest mistake” that somebody on the admin team tried to take back. I haven’t seen a case like this, it’s very eye-catching to me, because it’s so obviously a mistake. To help make you feel better, I’ll tell you a little story. 2 years ago I spent about 2000 bucks on a Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptop. I took it to a computer repair guy to clean the dust out of it on the inside and replace the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU. He used a forced air compressor to clean the fans and didn’t see that a loose wire on his work table was inadvertently in contact with one of the cooling fans. Snap! Broke the fan. He apologized personally to me (like, you know, face to face) and promised me he would replace the component he broke free of charge, plus do the whole entire job in front of me so I could see what he was doing. He fulfilled his promise. I must admit, it was quite boring to sit through watching him take out all the screws, etc. But he kept his word and did the right thing. The people that run lemmy world seem to me to be a lot more honest than dishonest and also very willing to admit they screwed up if they screwed up, just like my computer repair guy. I’m very certain that if you pm an admin the very admin responsible for the error will write to you personally. You were just unlucky. Somebody wrote a bad script or was tired and wasn’t thinking clearly. I think it says a lot about how someone attempted to restore your posts. Also, if the images attached to them can’t be recovered, is it too much work on your part to delete the empty restored posts and just make new posts with the images? Maybe in between posts, you can count to ten so it doesn’t look like spam or something? I think that would help make your community look nicer and more appealing to subscribers who like comic book art.
Thank you for the kind words and support!