But yesterday, while we were conversing there, and without any warning or opportunity to take any sort of self-corrective action, your Community Manager went nuclear and destroyed all of that user data. All of it. Every last thread. With a push of a button. Threads that were meaningful and important to us. This was data that did not belong to Yahoo! Elisa. You destroyed something that did not belong to you. You destroyed hours and hours of peoples hard work maliciously and callously. You destroyed a group dedicated to free speech, but more significantly you destroyed a group that thousands of people had put significant emotional energy into. And do you know what your Community Manager was tweeting mere seconds before she nuked this very popular group Elisa? She was tweeting “I hate your freedom.” That’s right Elisa I, hate, your, freedom. That’s the image that I chose to go with this letter to you. A screenshot of her freedom hating tweet. - Thomas Hawk

That message is just so malicious and personal. - Andrew Smith

Yes it is Andrew, unfortunately. But this is the message that Yahoo apparently seems to want to allow to be sent out to the masses when they rip apart an online community. - Thomas Hawk

Big thumbs up, Thomas! - Mahendra (SkepticGeek)

I am touched, Thomas. Thanks for writing this down and sharing it with us. The tweet from Heather was unwarranted. Flickr has always enjoyed a lot of community love - even when they merged with Yahoo. However, the last few episodes with the service have just left us all with a bad taste in our mouths and I think the time is now for them to dramatically change the way they function or for us to look for alternatives. Whatever route we take from here, one thing is certain - the Flickr of yore will be missed and forever loved. - Asfaq

I'm not in 100% agreement with you on this one Thomas, although I will say that it seems Flickr were far too quick in deleting the group. But the whole concept of 'freedom of speech' is more than a little wishy washy to me. Speech is one of a number of competing freedoms, and in the real world they just doesn't work. For true freedom, go and live on an island with a population of one - you. Otherwise, life is all about compromise. I think most communities out there would delete a thread or group once it had become littered with death threats and personal attacks...I'm assuming this ties in with the James Rhodes thing. The guy is nothing more than troll. He shouldn't have been given the time of day, and should have been ignored. Dare I even go so far as to say that he's 'that guy' as stated in the Flickr rules? - Gary

Gary, that's fine. And as someone who *clearly* had crossed a flickr line by posting threats of violence James should have had his account deleted by Flickr. He threatened people with violence. He clearly crossed a line. I would have had no problem with that. When his account was deleted every violent reference he made would be gone. But nuking a group of almost 3,500 people for his actions (and in fairness my reaction to his violence which was threatening to blog about it) was wrong. They could have handled this situation with the participants/threads that they objected to rather than punishing a large, vibrant and active community. - Thomas Hawk

My question now would be, did no one report him to Flickr? Could he not be ejected from the group? Some people, not necessarily you, were baiting him. I do agree that Flickr were too quick to nuke the group, but at the same time the group admins were too slow to address the problem themselves. You and other admins must have been aware of the potential consequences of having a running conversation like that going on. Regardless, it's a shame the group is gone. More care should be taken by all sides when you have something that is so positive and worthwhile. I would also say though, that the only way of keeping data safe, is to keep it yourself and entrust no one with it. I blog via Wordpress, but export a copy of my blog weekly....just in case. You can't do that on Flickr of course. How's Friendfeed working out as a replacement? I'm not convinced it's the perfect envirnoment to replicate what you had, but I could be wrong. Why not just grab the DMU3.com domain, set up a forum and go from there? - Gary

Gary, I believe the user was reported to Flickr, multiple times. They did nothing to him from what I understand. If you eject a user from the group they can just rejoin over and over and over again with new accounts. It solves nothing. Only flickr can ban actual IP addresses. FF is working out ok for now. It's not ideal. We had a lot of threads with images and gifs in them. You can't post images and gifs to friendfeed comments. That's too bad. We also liked the ability to format text in threads. Sometimes we'd write longerish posts in the comments and it's nice that comments on flickr recognize basic formatting. Friendfeed comments won't even recognize a paragraph break. I think FF is a good short-term alternative, but I'm not sure it will work longer term. We had a thread where we posted small sized images of photos that had been deleted by the group called the deleted repository, we can't really do that here. Then there is the whole issue about the future of FF being up in the air. We're exploring other options using our own servers now, FF is working temporarily I think, but we've got to come up with a better solution. - Thomas Hawk

I should add that Flickr did eventually nuke the user's account, but not until he made similar threats of violence in the Help Forum. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas...that's fair enough. More black marks to Flickr for not taking action sooner regarding James the Troll. I belong to a more general non photo forum where sock puppet accounts of banned users appear over and over again. The only solution is to not respond, but in any environment where there are a large number of users, there will always be one or two who snap back now and again. Do you think your 'running battles' with Flickr contributed to their being so trigger happy? - Gary

Btw, I wouldn't even give James the time of day. On your blog you said you'd give him the opportunity to reply. He was never going to contribute anything other than BS, and has proven that. You should just delete his comments. Leaving them there just encourages him. - Gary