Reposting in here.
I'll refrain from posting my thoughts about the whole ordeal that's happened over the past few days, but I'll say this:
I've been reading GAF nearly every day for several years now, and despite my name and low post count, I'm not someone's alt account. I've always preferred reading threads instead of participating in them. I've read and followed almost all the drama and scandals that GAF throughout the years, but the way this whole situation has been handled is by far the worst. It's been so bad, that I don't think things could have been handled much worse even if you wanted to intentionally sabotage this website. It's been outrageously bad.
To me though, locking everyone out of old OT is probably the worst mistake. It makes zero sense. People are saying it's for privacy reasons? ...What? This is a public forum that can be viewed by anyone. You shouldn't have any expectations of privacy for what you write. Like with any social media, if you don't want other people to read what you post, or if your worried what you write will come back to bite you in the ass one day... then don't post it. It's not like the OT was full of sensitive information that had been gathered and posted without another person's permission. Doxing has never been tolerated, so any private information like that was always removed by a mod.
If you don't want people reviving a bunch of old threads or just want to start with a fresh OT, you don't have to basically delete everything that was already in there. Just lock all of the old threads and move them into an archive that people can still read and search through. Like others have said, there was a lot of memories and history in those old posts, and to no longer even have access to them is really messed up. Cutting off access to them makes it looks like you have something to hide. Maybe you do, and maybe you don't, I won't make a judgement either way. I'm sure you're smart enough to realize though that even if you are trying to hide something, purging all of that information won't make things go back to how they used to be before the allegations appeared. And if you're not hiding anything, surely you realize how bad this look, right?
There were a lot of old threads that I enjoyed going back through and re-reading. Or reading through them because I had missed it when they were still active and only saw them later because someone had linked to it in a different thread. Not to mention all of the treads that I was still planning on reading when I had the time, or the ones I had bookmarked because they had a bunch of interesting, funny, or useful content in them. So what, now all of that is just gone?
If you really want to start with a fresh slate for the OT, then fine. But don't delete the old one, and make it so you can't even read it. Lock it, and put it in an archive as a reminder to everyone that this is now the past, and not what you want the new OT to look like or to become.
