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by zxcvbn4038 1956 days ago
It took years but all of my old Usenet posts eventually were removed. The people running archives tended to be real jerks about it - I’m pretty sure a couple of them got off on telling me no with long hand typed explanations, but in the end most of them were running archives on their employer’s equipment and when they switched jobs, got let go, or retired they couldn’t take it with them and nobody else wanted to maintain them so eventually the last copy I could find fell.
1 comments

The jerk was someone publishing something publicly, voluntarily, then perversely trying to make anyone who might have saved their copies of the thing you gave them, delete them.

I'm amazed anyone gave you the time if day. I can't imagine I'd have even answered. I certainly never signed any kind of copyright agreement when I started posting on BBS's or newsgroups.

Somewhere on one or more old hard drives somewhere I may have a few years of whatever groups I was into at the time, and I tell you now, on this new similar public forum, I will not bother digging out and scanning all my old drives to find anything to remove it, and I will not promise never to add them to any public archive.

Different situation but same overall attitude. I'd send a polite one-line request asking to remove a specific message and I'd get back three or four hand-typed pages where the person was gloating that I was powerless to make them do anything, basically the the same thing I see revenge porn victims going through - though nobody ever tried to charge me to remove a post and nobody went the route of re-posting my messages to spite me.