"And" the availability of information is important.
Respectfully, on most forums, I don't care about the community, I care about the content, that's why I'm there, to have discourse and generate meaningful value in the form of knowledge. If someone passes, yes, that sucks, but that's life, we're all snuffing it at some point. However, the world carries on spinning, and that information should continue to be available, especially if the forum is for a niche and frequently generates useful information.
If a forum is becoming "toxic" then that sounds like a moderation problem.
It seems like these kind of forums are not exactly your area of interest, if they're community focused. Information gets snuffed out all the time, with every death of a person we lose large piece of information, but hoarding, and especially expecting others to hoard or assist hoarding is not the correct approach to what is essentially a _you_ problem, so grab that terabyte disk and make a mirror yourself if you are so inclined. Nobody is or should be required to let corpo behemoths in for your convenience and to comply with your questionable opinions.
I'm part of several digital archivism projects. My personal disk array is 54TB of data. That's without even getting into 1PB+ of data on LTO carts.
Last time I checked, Archive.org et al weren't a "corpo behemoth", but consuming server resources is exactly what a normal user does.
Site owners should get with the times and serve up cached static pages to users who aren't logged in. Even then, they should be serving up cached static pages and rebuilding cache for relevant pages when someone posts new content when it comes to forums. Not being able to handle a few crawlers is an administration problem. Why should the community/public suffer for someone's inability to configure a server appropriately?
We live in primarily free societies where individual has the right to decide upon their actions. Telling people that there is only one "correct" way of doing things is obnoxious and toxic and reflects upon your inability to see your opinion for what it is, an opinion.
My opinion is that "screw crawlers and scrapers" is a valid opinion. If i'm hosting a playground, it's my playground and my rules. If you want to play elsewhere, please do. If you want to preserve data, please do, but not at my expense.
Disagree with that? feel free to, but don't think that you are somehow in the right, because if you go with this shit to court, you will be laughed out of the door.
You have no inherent right to other people's data, regardless of how they shared it or the visibility of it at the time they shared it. You are not owed the sum of human knowledge.
If people wished for their content to be available to all forever they'd run a blog and pay to ensure it is available, and would proactively seek to get it archived.
People on forums aren't doing that, and the data of any given individual is a contextless collection of semi-random mumblings on different topics because without the fullness of a conversation involving others none of it makes sense.
It is within that context that a forum admin can decide what to do, they have been granted right (by T&C) to the collection of all the forum members comments which restores the context and gives meaning to the content. Every individual on the forums I operate can obtain their own data, but it would be meaningless by itself.
As the operator of the collection of content I get to determine what best to do with that, and sometimes that may be to delete it all. Sometimes that may be to seek to archive it. And on this occasion it is to treat this knowledge as having valuable to those already participating in the community and to not be shared beyond that.
Elsewhere you said this:
> Call it what most forums are: an ad-supported business. People generate content for the owner for free because they too derive value from the information that others share. The middleman is just a middleman
But the 300+ forums I run have no adverts, they are not a business, they are non-profit. Their value (if you want to measure everything in a capitalist way) is social, to help those in the community.
The purpose of the forums I run isn't to expand the sum of human knowledge, or to make myself personally wealthy of the back of the efforts of others, the purpose is to help be a remedy to adult loneliness by connecting people by their shared interests in geographically small areas such that it builds relationships and forms bonds.
Yes there is a hell of a lot of expertise captured here around those interests... but no-one has any inherent right to it.
This tangent is in relation to my shuttering one forum.
That forum was around a music band in the UK, and the audience of the forum turned out to be lower than expected - University age. They were emotionally immature, over-shared online, slept with each other, had relationships and break-ups... all in public. The music forum did have lots of music info on it, but it was intertwined with a lot of very highly personal information posted at a time when a reasonable expectation of the internet was ephemerality.
It was totally right to protect the individuals future selves from their past selves, and I would delete again.
There are certainly downsides to hording data. At the very least, information takes up space. It also tends to suck up mental bandwidth: you have to keep organizing, de-duplicating, and migrating to newer formats. It's much easier to just delete it. Just like it's much easier to throw old ratty tshirts. IMO, data hoarding is just as much of a mental disorder as hoarding physical stuff.
This idea that all information must be preserved for forever is also at odds with privacy. See, e.g., the right to be forgotten.
I think that the reason that many people don't put much effort into archiving information is a cultural one. Most people simply haven't given much thought to the question of fate of information or knowledge they happen to find, and the importance of preserving that knowledge for health of society's discourse.
Respectfully, on most forums, I don't care about the community, I care about the content, that's why I'm there, to have discourse and generate meaningful value in the form of knowledge. If someone passes, yes, that sucks, but that's life, we're all snuffing it at some point. However, the world carries on spinning, and that information should continue to be available, especially if the forum is for a niche and frequently generates useful information.
If a forum is becoming "toxic" then that sounds like a moderation problem.