I petition those tasked with this destruction officially or unofficially, preserve the data! At the very least submit the page to the Wayback Machine at archive.org. Or better contact the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team and allow them to image the forum.
At some future point these regulations may be amended and you may be able to restore. This data is very important to MInecraft history.
Archive.org already has most of the forum archived. (I often use it to dig up old versions of mods when the formatting changes eat the old links.) Unfortunately, with the live copies gone, Google and other search engines will start removing those threads from their search results, and we don't know what URL to plug in to the archive anymore.
I'm not sure if you mentioned this in your original post, but to provide some background info I made an account around the summer of 2014. This was before they required you to make a twitch account to browse the Minecraft Forums. I want to log into my old account and use that (Instead of this current one I'm using), but when I press log in on the top right it tells me to sign in via twitch. Since my original account was supposedly made with no twitch recognition (I think?), I'm not sure if I can get my account back.
Do you know if there's a way? My memory is foggy about the rules that occurred when the forums were integrating with twitch (Which was a few years back)...
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
7/10/2011
Posts:
46
Member Details
I didn't want to get into this, but I was linked this thread once again, so here I am. I didn't want to give any of you a hard time (but honestly, do you care what a random idiot says on an Internet forum?)
First, none of your 4 e-mails (8 in my case, each for Minecraft and Gamepedia) stated that any data would be erased. Just that one would lose access to his account. The titles were also great: "❗FINAL NOTICE: Consent Required for Uninterrupted Service❗"
Any person would care about his account, but not your "service interruptions". I myself didn't do anything until the very last e-mail. Was it so hard to mention an account transfer in the subject field?
1/3rd of a healthy forum just vanished over night - Yahoo would have be proud of such effort, they have a long history of closing down and deleting everything left and right. Nobody could have thought it would only take 3-4 weeks, since acquisition became public, to finish the "transfer". The admins did a good job. (hm... probably without sarcasm this time)
(1) ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifieror to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
(2) ‘processing’ means any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction;
(23) ‘cross-border processing’ means either:
(a) processing of personal data which takes place in the context of the activities of establishments in more than one Member State of a controller or processor in the Union where the controller or processor is established in more than one Member State; or
(b) processing of personal data which takes place in the context of the activities of a single establishment of a controller or processor in the Union but which substantially affects or is likely to substantially affect data subjects in more than one Member State.
If the public forum posts were personal data, every page hit outside the EU would have been a violation of GDPR. Backups in different Data Centres would also be a violation of 23a. to my understanding.
By the way, what did Steam do to profiles when they updated for GDPR? They introduced more privacy settings to profiles, and DEFAULTED the new "my game list" option to FRIENDS-ONLY, so it wouldn't be public by default for anyone.
A neat side-effect was that they locked out SteamSpy with that move.
What makes me actually sad, is that no one cared enough to escalate/communicate it earlier to try and avoid it.
I only hope that you'll figure it out and restore the published content. 42nd post. I'm out.
For clarity: the situation is that posts have been soft deleted and while there is no technical reason we cannot restore posts, it is effectively impossible for us to restore them because we do not have any tools available, and doing it post by post by hand would take hundreds of moderator hours, potentially thousands depending on the reclamation rate. I am not willing to commit the forum staff to that, I think it would be deeply unfair to expect volunteers to perform that task.
The intention is for an automated process to be built and launched -- that's what the form is for expressing an interest in -- but I cannot guarantee that will happen due to the resources required. Realistically, if that process is launched then we expect to see full recovery of all posts belonging to reclaimed users, if that process isn't launched then I do not expect to see the majority of posts restored.
I have let moderators make a decision on an individual basis if they wish to restore posts of reclaimed users, however I haven't publicised this in the announcement because I don't wish moderators to be inundated with requests.
I am affected by this and just 'restored' my account. Although I did not contribute much (only a tutorial and some show offs), it would be nice if my contents could be restored.
But what I really don't understand is what anonymous forum postings have to do with EU laws.
According to a mod developer, some people external to the forum have made full backups of the site. It's unclear when the backups were made, and if/when they will be made public. But there is at least some hope that the history will be preserved where the official source has failed.
Edit: Said mod developer has not followed up on their claim.
But then the posts would be visible to some, which would mean the GDPR was not fully followed and fines would ensue
You could (it would appear) have soft deleted the posts so that the threads were otherwise intact and all that was visible was that there was/had been a post #N, with neither the post body nor the name of the poster showing.
This should not be taken as legal advice (and GDPR has little enough jurisprudence in any case), but (by my reading) this ought to meet the requirements.
[The issue of all or part of the removed material being quoted by remaining members would remain, but it would not seem the site should be held any more accountable for that than it is for my quoting off-site material that may originate with GDPR-applicable parties who have not provided this site with consent.
As example:
Mumbo Jumbo is the youtube handle of a UK citizen (hence falling under GDPR protections)
to the best of my knowledge (and per argumentum) he is not a member here
if one of my posts includes:
In his video >link<, Mumbo said "some quote"
it is difficult to see how the site could be considered liable....]
Restoring the thraeds with only some of the post accessible is far from an optimal solution, but would avoid the loss of at least part of the information memory-holed by The Great Purge.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Why does everything have to be so stoopid?" Harvey Pekar (from American Splendor)
WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.
The way this GDPR thing is being implemented sounds like the equivalent of trying to make someone "unremeber" something they were told in the past. Besides when did the EU got complete jurisdiction of the internet, and why was I not informed? (there wasn't even cake served...) Perhaps all the Europeans need to contact their EU representative and have a long talk about this law.
Citricsquid: I'm not sure what pressures are being laid on you from above, but bluntly: You need to admit that this is a class-1 screwup and an abuse of the site by its owners.
We are already hearing from folks who should have been notified and weren't. Elsewhere you note the consent was opt-in for a month or so, after which it was closed -- and somehow "popups every 5 minutes" didn't make it through to an awful lot of people. The fact that a third of the forum's posts were affected makes a mockery of your claims to have effectively sought consent.
Especially in light of that, you do not get to dismiss hiding a third of the site's content, with "we appreciate that this is very disruptive but it was necessary to meet our legal obligations under the GDPR." That is so tone-deaf and gratuitously callous that it has to have been dictated by a lawyer. Interestingly, in one of your later messages, you refer to "Amazon's lawyers".... This sounds suspiciously like the site is being abused to flip the bird at European regulation, at the expense of our active and dedicated European users. This is not cool.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I did some CraftTweaker scripts for Mystical Agriculture. They fill in a couple of small gaps in MA, and also let you make or duplicate not only vanilla plants, but the blocks, plants and wood from Quark and Biomes O'Plenty. Also spawn eggs for most vanilla mobs! The scripts are here on Github.
There are a lot of moving parts and considerations when it comes to the acquisition of a company, this is especially true when it involves one of the biggest companies in the world in a process that they have never gone through before. At no point did anybody make a decision out of spite. Hard decisions had to be made, and certainly those decisions aren't without consequences, but it's a mischaracterisation to suggest that this was anything other than a best effort made by people operating on tight timelines with many constraints and considerations.
As a company I believe that we have demonstrated that we are committed to understanding the value of community and importance of content through our actions -- even when we shut down a website, we archive it rather than allow it to disappear from the internet -- and I'm hoping that people understand that this is as painful for us as it is for you. I would never claim that losing content is a good outcome but it was the best available outcome given everything that we had to deal with. I think it's very important to understand the actions that were taken in the context of a company that is worth $800,000,000,000 in an environment where regulators are looking very seriously at companies like Amazon.
There's no pressure on me from above, although our formal communications were authored with the Amazon legal department heavily involved, my comments here do not have any legal review and I'm free to say what I choose -- especially as we're no longer a part of Amazon.
I am not European so I do not know the details or the processes used in drafting and implementing this legislation or its implementation. That said I am greatly affected by its consequences on this site. This has to do with the age of the users at time of their posts? Or opt-in language or what?
I just don't see how laws can be applied retroactively to historical material. Surely EU regs didn't intend that? Especially since most likely a huge percentage of the people who were underage at the time are over age now. Can you imagine if YouTube removes all of its videos produced by underage creators? What would happen to Minecraft videos then?
I do understand that this must have been a hard decision. I mean basically for all intents you have destroyed this forum. A huge measure of posts from the most active time and most important users are gone. Buildcraft, IndustrialCraft, Botania, etc. Disgusting. And your incoming traffic will suffer greatly, thus your ad revenue.
I like many curse this site everyday now and will never trust any valuable content to it. The company, Curse, earned its name with me.
I am not European so I do not know the details or the processes used in drafting and implementing this legislation or its implementation. That said I am greatly affected by its consequences on this site. This has to do with the age of the users at time of their posts? Or opt-in language or what?
I just don't see how laws can be applied retroactively to historical material. Surely EU regs didn't intend that? Especially since most likely a huge percentage of the people who were underage at the time are over age now. Can you imagine if YouTube removes all of its videos produced by underage creators? What would happen to Minecraft videos then?
You can read about the law online by searching for "GDPR". The law is comprehensive and covers all aspects of collecting, using and managing user data. A fundamental component of this law is consent, meaning data collectors must obtain consent for a wide variety of actions, including the transfer of data. That means to be compliant with the law we were obligated to obtain consent from every user in the European Economic Area to transfer their data. Many users did not provide their consent and as a consequence we were not legally allowed to transfer their data. This was an intended consequence of the legislation. YouTube would have to go through the same process if it were sold.
Many users would certainly have if given the option ... I would definitely have provided my consent if the notification email were sent to the email account I'm actually using for this forum right now, and not to an obsolete one I used 6 years ago. "Many users could not provide their consent ..." would be a better way to put it.
I think more important than "who's responsible?" or "was this really necessary?" is the question: "What is being done to fix this mess?" ...
So far, not very much as it appears, but maybe you can give us an update on how things stand right now?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Better than Default" v2.7 for MC 1.20 is available now!
I am not a lawyer or a corporate raider but it would seem that the whole notion of "consent" is completely misplaced in the results of this action. What the users did not specifically give you is permission to delete their content and accounts. They consented to their content being available by posting it and since no further action to remove it was taken on their part, then they consented to the content remaining. I cannot see how it could be interpreted any other way.
That is why it may be the case that something prevented them from being able to provide consent in the past that met the standard of the law? Being that age or EULA language or whatever.
I understand that the law applied when the transfer of assets to a new company took place. That users never consented to that. But only users with a certain economic region mattered in this decision? My consent did not matter. Thus their stake is disproportionate.
If it was me as negotiator in making this deal then there would be no way I would agree to delete 1/3 of the forum's historical data and value. Just as a simple precondition that would be a non-starter. That is totally reprehensible that the deal could go forward in this climate of usury and madness. Any responsible entity that cared about their place in history (of the 2nd most popular game ever) would have sought a better set of terms. Maybe the whole place was on fire and having a fire sale, I don't know.
Anyway, I post this just in case other companies or entities more responsibly contemplate the effects of their actions. The real world effects, not the enrichment of the executives.
I petition those tasked with this destruction officially or unofficially, preserve the data! At the very least submit the page to the Wayback Machine at archive.org. Or better contact the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team and allow them to image the forum.
At some future point these regulations may be amended and you may be able to restore. This data is very important to MInecraft history.
Archive.org already has most of the forum archived. (I often use it to dig up old versions of mods when the formatting changes eat the old links.) Unfortunately, with the live copies gone, Google and other search engines will start removing those threads from their search results, and we don't know what URL to plug in to the archive anymore.
I'm not sure if you mentioned this in your original post, but to provide some background info I made an account around the summer of 2014. This was before they required you to make a twitch account to browse the Minecraft Forums. I want to log into my old account and use that (Instead of this current one I'm using), but when I press log in on the top right it tells me to sign in via twitch. Since my original account was supposedly made with no twitch recognition (I think?), I'm not sure if I can get my account back.
Do you know if there's a way? My memory is foggy about the rules that occurred when the forums were integrating with twitch (Which was a few years back)...
my original name was Tuaam.
Click Here for Cubic Chunks
Any updates on the Automatic System or being able to ask staff to restore a specific post.
I didn't want to get into this, but I was linked this thread once again, so here I am. I didn't want to give any of you a hard time (but honestly, do you care what a random idiot says on an Internet forum?)
First, none of your 4 e-mails (8 in my case, each for Minecraft and Gamepedia) stated that any data would be erased. Just that one would lose access to his account. The titles were also great: "❗FINAL NOTICE: Consent Required for Uninterrupted Service❗"
Any person would care about his account, but not your "service interruptions". I myself didn't do anything until the very last e-mail. Was it so hard to mention an account transfer in the subject field?
1/3rd of a healthy forum just vanished over night - Yahoo would have be proud of such effort, they have a long history of closing down and deleting everything left and right. Nobody could have thought it would only take 3-4 weeks, since acquisition became public, to finish the "transfer". The admins did a good job. (hm... probably without sarcasm this time)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679
If the public forum posts were personal data, every page hit outside the EU would have been a violation of GDPR. Backups in different Data Centres would also be a violation of 23a. to my understanding.
By the way, what did Steam do to profiles when they updated for GDPR? They introduced more privacy settings to profiles, and DEFAULTED the new "my game list" option to FRIENDS-ONLY, so it wouldn't be public by default for anyone.
A neat side-effect was that they locked out SteamSpy with that move.
What makes me actually sad, is that no one cared enough to escalate/communicate it earlier to try and avoid it.
I only hope that you'll figure it out and restore the published content.
42nd post. I'm out.
I played this game before you knew what it was
I am affected by this and just 'restored' my account. Although I did not contribute much (only a tutorial and some show offs), it would be nice if my contents could be restored.
But what I really don't understand is what anonymous forum postings have to do with EU laws.
This is disgusting, I was about to download some old mods for beta 1.7.3 but now they're officially lost media. Dead, non existent. GG.
According to a mod developer, some people external to the forum have made full backups of the site. It's unclear when the backups were made, and if/when they will be made public. But there is at least some hope that the history will be preserved where the official source has failed.
Edit: Said mod developer has not followed up on their claim.
There are archives elsewhere, plus a bunch of us have collections. What were you looking for in particular?
Instead of just deleting posts, they could've just make them unavailable to EU users
You could (it would appear) have soft deleted the posts so that the threads were otherwise intact and all that was visible was that there was/had been a post #N, with neither the post body nor the name of the poster showing.
This should not be taken as legal advice (and GDPR has little enough jurisprudence in any case), but (by my reading) this ought to meet the requirements.
[The issue of all or part of the removed material being quoted by remaining members would remain, but it would not seem the site should be held any more accountable for that than it is for my quoting off-site material that may originate with GDPR-applicable parties who have not provided this site with consent.
As example:
Mumbo Jumbo is the youtube handle of a UK citizen (hence falling under GDPR protections)
to the best of my knowledge (and per argumentum) he is not a member here
if one of my posts includes:
it is difficult to see how the site could be considered liable....]
Restoring the thraeds with only some of the post accessible is far from an optimal solution, but would avoid the loss of at least part of the information memory-holed by The Great Purge.
The way this GDPR thing is being implemented sounds like the equivalent of trying to make someone "unremeber" something they were told in the past. Besides when did the EU got complete jurisdiction of the internet, and why was I not informed? (there wasn't even cake served...) Perhaps all the Europeans need to contact their EU representative and have a long talk about this law.
Citricsquid: I'm not sure what pressures are being laid on you from above, but bluntly: You need to admit that this is a class-1 screwup and an abuse of the site by its owners.
We are already hearing from folks who should have been notified and weren't. Elsewhere you note the consent was opt-in for a month or so, after which it was closed -- and somehow "popups every 5 minutes" didn't make it through to an awful lot of people. The fact that a third of the forum's posts were affected makes a mockery of your claims to have effectively sought consent.
Especially in light of that, you do not get to dismiss hiding a third of the site's content, with "we appreciate that this is very disruptive but it was necessary to meet our legal obligations under the GDPR." That is so tone-deaf and gratuitously callous that it has to have been dictated by a lawyer. Interestingly, in one of your later messages, you refer to "Amazon's lawyers".... This sounds suspiciously like the site is being abused to flip the bird at European regulation, at the expense of our active and dedicated European users. This is not cool.
There are a lot of moving parts and considerations when it comes to the acquisition of a company, this is especially true when it involves one of the biggest companies in the world in a process that they have never gone through before. At no point did anybody make a decision out of spite. Hard decisions had to be made, and certainly those decisions aren't without consequences, but it's a mischaracterisation to suggest that this was anything other than a best effort made by people operating on tight timelines with many constraints and considerations.
As a company I believe that we have demonstrated that we are committed to understanding the value of community and importance of content through our actions -- even when we shut down a website, we archive it rather than allow it to disappear from the internet -- and I'm hoping that people understand that this is as painful for us as it is for you. I would never claim that losing content is a good outcome but it was the best available outcome given everything that we had to deal with. I think it's very important to understand the actions that were taken in the context of a company that is worth $800,000,000,000 in an environment where regulators are looking very seriously at companies like Amazon.
There's no pressure on me from above, although our formal communications were authored with the Amazon legal department heavily involved, my comments here do not have any legal review and I'm free to say what I choose -- especially as we're no longer a part of Amazon.
I am not European so I do not know the details or the processes used in drafting and implementing this legislation or its implementation. That said I am greatly affected by its consequences on this site. This has to do with the age of the users at time of their posts? Or opt-in language or what?
I just don't see how laws can be applied retroactively to historical material. Surely EU regs didn't intend that? Especially since most likely a huge percentage of the people who were underage at the time are over age now. Can you imagine if YouTube removes all of its videos produced by underage creators? What would happen to Minecraft videos then?
I do understand that this must have been a hard decision. I mean basically for all intents you have destroyed this forum. A huge measure of posts from the most active time and most important users are gone. Buildcraft, IndustrialCraft, Botania, etc. Disgusting. And your incoming traffic will suffer greatly, thus your ad revenue.
I like many curse this site everyday now and will never trust any valuable content to it. The company, Curse, earned its name with me.
You can read about the law online by searching for "GDPR". The law is comprehensive and covers all aspects of collecting, using and managing user data. A fundamental component of this law is consent, meaning data collectors must obtain consent for a wide variety of actions, including the transfer of data. That means to be compliant with the law we were obligated to obtain consent from every user in the European Economic Area to transfer their data. Many users did not provide their consent and as a consequence we were not legally allowed to transfer their data. This was an intended consequence of the legislation. YouTube would have to go through the same process if it were sold.
Many users would certainly have if given the option ... I would definitely have provided my consent if the notification email were sent to the email account I'm actually using for this forum right now, and not to an obsolete one I used 6 years ago. "Many users could not provide their consent ..." would be a better way to put it.
I think more important than "who's responsible?" or "was this really necessary?" is the question: "What is being done to fix this mess?" ...
So far, not very much as it appears, but maybe you can give us an update on how things stand right now?
personal data. as I underlined in my previous post.
I played this game before you knew what it was
any updates on restoring old posts, or making a new post on the same URL?
I am not a lawyer or a corporate raider but it would seem that the whole notion of "consent" is completely misplaced in the results of this action. What the users did not specifically give you is permission to delete their content and accounts. They consented to their content being available by posting it and since no further action to remove it was taken on their part, then they consented to the content remaining. I cannot see how it could be interpreted any other way.
That is why it may be the case that something prevented them from being able to provide consent in the past that met the standard of the law? Being that age or EULA language or whatever.
I understand that the law applied when the transfer of assets to a new company took place. That users never consented to that. But only users with a certain economic region mattered in this decision? My consent did not matter. Thus their stake is disproportionate.
If it was me as negotiator in making this deal then there would be no way I would agree to delete 1/3 of the forum's historical data and value. Just as a simple precondition that would be a non-starter. That is totally reprehensible that the deal could go forward in this climate of usury and madness. Any responsible entity that cared about their place in history (of the 2nd most popular game ever) would have sought a better set of terms. Maybe the whole place was on fire and having a fire sale, I don't know.
Anyway, I post this just in case other companies or entities more responsibly contemplate the effects of their actions. The real world effects, not the enrichment of the executives.