Where's Mike?

[Jerry Martin]

Hello,

I just noticed that everything and anything that had to do with Mike Barr has been erased.

Does anyone have any info on who prompted this? Was it Mike decision or did a moderator pull him?

In peace, Jerry

[jkinnear]

Mike chose to remove himself from this board. And he deleted all his posts and his account.

Unfortunately he also deleted many other member's posts along with his. I feel that he had every right to delete his posts but not anyone else's. As it stands now many threads have been lost. The only way to recover those posts would be to reset from a backup, which would loose some newer posts and some new members.

I hope that this does not "stunt" the growth" of this board. Although Mike was one of the biggest contributors and without him I suspect much less activity on this board.

[Jerry Martin]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the quick response. I'm sorry to see him go. He has a unique perspective on our system that is irreplacable.

However, I believe, by him falling on his sword, so-to-speak, this forum might retain many of it's current members that were upset by his remarks.

It was an honorable thing for him to do.

In peace, Jerry[/img]

[kungfujoe]

For what it's worth, much of the thread deletion was unintentional. He deleted all of the threads that he initiated (which, in itself, caused many other users' posts to be deleted), and he deleted the "connections" thread that became rather contentious, but in doing so, he accidentally deleted all of the other threads in the "general" forum as well. Unfortunately, in the current version of phpBB, at least, there's no "undo" option after you've deleted a post, a thread, or all threads in a forum.

The forum is (manually) backed up pretty infrequently (my hosting service is pretty reliable, with their own regular backups to protect against hardware failure, so I didn't see any reason to do backups frequently except when changes are being made to the board), so there's no way to undo the accident without also losing other posts, and losing multiple user accounts.

I fully agree with you, Jerry. I'm disappointed to see Mike leave. He's got a wealth of experience in our art, having literally grown up in it since early childhood. Many of his posts stimulated a lot of thought and some interesting discussion, regardless of the reaction to the last thread he was active in (which, as far as Internet discussions go, was actually pretty subdued).