DOES ANYONE KNOW? Considering deleting my account... — Frequently Asked Questions on True Nudists

BornAgainOriginal Poster

Aug 8, 2022

If I delete my account will tn still have access to photos and videos on my page?

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JO
John
Aug 9, 2022
[quote]If I delete my account will tn still have access to photos and videos on my page?[/quote] Even if you delete them first. When you delete media, the only thing that gets deleted is the link to the media on the media server. The actual media remains. Admins are aware because I told them. It has not been rectified. John aka cobeachbum
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BO
BornAgainOriginal Poster
Aug 15, 2022
[quote]If I delete my account will tn still have access to photos and videos on my page? Even if you delete them first. When you delete media, the only thing that gets deleted is the link to the media on the media server. The actual media remains. Admins are aware because I told them. It has not been rectified. John aka cobeachbum[/quote] Thank you John. I appreciate your response and effort... Imagine that, no rectification here. All the more reason to stop posting pictures at the very minimum.
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JO
John
Oct 26, 2022
[quote]If I delete my account will tn still have access to photos and videos on my page? Even if you delete them first. When you delete media, the only thing that gets deleted is the link to the media on the media server. The actual media remains. Admins are aware because I told them. It has not been rectified. John aka cobeachbum[/quote] Most server software systems have a housekeeping function that periodically collects all unused space (including deleted items) into one block for re-use. This either runs at specified times such as weekends for office systems or runs automatically in the background when the usage level is low, such as the small hours of the morning. I strongly suspect that in due course your photographs, etc. would get over-written.
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BI
Bill
Oct 26, 2022
I'm no software engineer but I've come to understand that by putting anything on the internet it is there forever. Most nudists have open minds about letting others see their real selves - once bareness has been displayed online it is then available to anyone with the knowledge it takes to access it. Your Velvet Elvis pictures and videos have already left the building ~ sorry ~ but for inner beauty's sake (aka mental health), I suggest taking a breath, try to relax, accept it, and be proud of the freedom that comes with no longer hiding one's outer beauty from the Inter-verse. [quote]If I delete my account will tn still have access to photos and videos on my page?Even if you delete them first. When you delete media, the only thing that gets deleted is the link to the media on the media server. The actual media remains. Admins are aware because I told them. It has not been rectified.John aka cobeachbum Most server software systems have a housekeeping function that periodically collects all unused space (including deleted items) into one block for re-use. This either runs at specified times such as weekends for office systems or runs automatically in the background when the usage level is low, such as the small hours of the morning. I strongly suspect that in due course your photographs, etc. would get over-written.[/quote]
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JO
John
Oct 26, 2022
[quote]If I delete my account will tn still have access to photos and videos on my page?Even if you delete them first. When you delete media, the only thing that gets deleted is the link to the media on the media server. The actual media remains. Admins are aware because I told them. It has not been rectified.John aka cobeachbumMost server software systems have a housekeeping function that periodically collects all unused space (including deleted items) into one block for re-use. This either runs at specified times such as weekends for office systems or runs automatically in the background when the usage level is low, such as the small hours of the morning.I strongly suspect that in due course your photographs, etc. would get over-written.[/quote]

I can verify this does NOT happen. I have a test I run periodically to call up media I deleted years ago. They are still on the media server, even after all this time. Some years ago, TN added a blurb that anything you post on here may remain indefinitely due to backups/recoveries, etc. I don't really remember if the blurb got added before or after I notified them of the media issue, but regardless, it hasn't been fixed. The media remains, apparentley forever.

John aka cobeachbum

Here's the blurb:

[strong]Deleting your account
Although we make a reasonable attempt to remove your information from our servers, your data may persist even after deletion in system backups, content delivery caches, or stored by 3rd party services that have cached your data (e.g. Search Engines or bots). Information posted to forums, or some sections of the site, may persist even after your account has been removed.[/strong]
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JO
John
Oct 26, 2022
[quote]How do you delete your account?[/quote] Click on your profile Your account My settings Account (tab) At the bottom is "I would like to close my account" Notice, it doesn't say "delete" John aka cobeachbum
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MI
Mike
Oct 27, 2022
Sounds like the TN owners need some help in their IT department.
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JO
John
Oct 27, 2022
[quote]Sounds like the TN owners need some help in their IT department.[/quote] Well, if one of their goals was to harvest images for dispersion elsewhere, or to bring attention to their site by linking to others, it appears that it's working exactly as designed.
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JO
John
Oct 28, 2022
[quote]Sounds like the TN owners need some help in their IT department.[/quote] WEB design is what they do. SocialCo Media | Dream. Design. Deliver.https://www.socialcomedia.com We create complex interactive web applications. Social Networking. Fully developed social networking components. Instant Messaging Systems. We are developing ...
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EA
EarlD
Oct 29, 2022
[quote]I Even if you delete them first. When you delete media, the only thing that gets deleted is the link to the media on the media server. The actual media remains. Admins are aware because I told them. It has not been rectified. John aka cobeachbum[/quote] One of the problems you run into when you role your own web site instead of building on regularly updated platform. That doesnt comply with GDPR
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JO
John
Oct 31, 2022
They *may* have fixed the issue. The test run I created now no longer loads the deleted images. I will create a new test run with more current deletions and see if they disappear from the media server in a timely manner.
John aka cobeachbum
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JO
John
Nov 1, 2022
Disregard. I was running a old version (somewhere along the way, they had changed the url to the media server). The media still exists, even the one I deleted ~6 hours ago.
I will run the test occassionally to see if the latest one gets deleted, but I'm not holding my breath. The other issue I failed to mention before is you don't even have to be logged on to access the media server. Not real secure.
John aka cobeachbum
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NO
Noah
Nov 2, 2022
This is an unfortunate problem in the whole software industry - nobody bothers to actually delete things from the Internet, and it's not just TrueNudists, most big sites - if you grab the direct link to the jpg image and then try and delete the picture, that jpg link always always works, years or decades later. Facebook, Discord, Grindr even - I once went digging thru my rooted Android phone and found the URL to my Grindr profile pic, and it's been 10 years and the link to that is still there if you know the URL, after I had deleted/replaced it/deleted my whole account.
I work as a software engineer and have been at a bunch of different companies, and can give some insider knowledge that: nobody in those companies cares enough to scrub their CDN (content delivery network) servers to remove from hard disk the pictures that were uploaded. Why? It costs them $nothing to just hold onto them, storage is extremely cheap (like $0.0001 per download of a picture, and if you "deleted" the picture, nobody's even downloading it anymore) - it costs more money to pay your developers to write the code that goes out and scrubs the CDN servers.
As a software developer, I've also run a lot of my own little rinkydink websites and personal projects -- in my own cases, I would program my site to actually delete things, make sure that the URL to the image goes 404, but that's because I operated off an actual hard disk with limited space, I would run out of space if I wasn't deleting anything! But at the corporate level, disk space is basically infinite, especially with big cloud providers like Amazon, and when I've brought this up at the companies I work at (how it would be neighborly of us to actually delete things), I don't win those arguments because money - it's $free to just not even bother with doing so.
A website will usually remove the database entry to the picture (maybe except for Facebook, data hungry as they are); but the jpeg itself sits on the CDN. And at that point, if they wanted to really scrub the deleted pics, a developer would need to write a whole program to cross-check the whole CDN against the database to identify the orphaned pictures and remove them... if a company doesn't want to invest in properly deleting off the CDN to begin with, it's more expensive to write such a boutique script to detect orphaned photos (not linked in the database).
So the story isn't "website backups may have copies still" - eventually the oldest backups would expire, and if a pic were truly deleted, new backups wouldn't include it to begin with. It's laziness and capitalism mainly. This is the status quo for basically the whole entire Internet, unfortunately! The good part is, the direct URL to your pic is long and random and nobody's going to just guess it, so "deleting" it is effective enough. But, people could have (long ago), right-clicked and saved your picture and it's on somebody's computer and they could upload it to other sites, and the cat's out of the bag even if TN were to scrub it from their servers.
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MA
Marcus
Nov 5, 2022
[quote]This is an unfortunate problem in the whole software industry - nobody bothers to actually delete things from the Internet, and it's not just TrueNudists, most big sites - if you grab the direct link to the jpg image and then try and delete the picture, that jpg link always always works, years or decades later. Facebook, Discord, Grindr even - I once went digging thru my rooted Android phone and found the URL to my Grindr profile pic, and it's been 10 years and the link to that is still there if you know the URL, after I had deleted/replaced it/deleted my whole account.I work as a software engineer and have been at a bunch of different companies, and can give some insider knowledge that: nobody in those companies cares enough to scrub their CDN (content delivery network) servers to remove from hard disk the pictures that were uploaded. Why? It costs them $nothing to just hold onto them, storage is extremely cheap (like $0.0001 per download of a picture, and if you "deleted" the picture, nobody's even downloading it anymore) - it costs more money to pay your developers to write the code that goes out and scrubs the CDN servers.As a software developer, I've also run a lot of my own little rinkydink websites and personal projects -- in my own cases, I would program my site to actually delete things, make sure that the URL to the image goes 404, but that's because I operated off an actual hard disk with limited space, I would run out of space if I wasn't deleting anything! But at the corporate level, disk space is basically infinite, especially with big cloud providers like Amazon, and when I've brought this up at the companies I work at (how it would be neighborly of us to actually delete things), I don't win those arguments because money - it's $free to just not even bother with doing so.A website will usually remove the database entry to the picture (maybe except for Facebook, data hungry as they are); but the jpeg itself sits on the CDN. And at that point, if they wanted to really scrub the deleted pics, a developer would need to write a whole program to cross-check the whole CDN against the database to identify the orphaned pictures and remove them... if a company doesn't want to invest in properly deleting off the CDN to begin with, it's more expensive to write such a boutique script to detect orphaned photos (not linked in the database).So the story isn't "website backups may have copies still" - eventually the oldest backups would expire, and if a pic were truly deleted, new backups wouldn't include it to begin with. It's laziness and capitalism mainly. This is the status quo for basically the whole entire Internet, unfortunately! The good part is, the direct URL to your pic is long and random and nobody's going to just guess it, so "deleting" it is effective enough. But, people could have (long ago), right-clicked and saved your picture and it's on somebody's computer and they could upload it to other sites, and the cat's out of the bag even if TN were to scrub it from their servers.[/quote]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. You should work for the EU. They are working on the digital service act, in which they try to bring in humanism to social networks.
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EA
EarlD
Nov 5, 2022
[quote]This is an unfortunate problem in the whole software industry - nobody bothers to actually delete things from the Internet, [/quote] As someone who runs a web site I agree you point about the reality. However with the GDPR in effect in Europe those sites risk huge fines if found to not have a mechanism for comple deletion of user data.
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DA
David
Dec 4, 2022
Nothing about this forum lets you delete anything! Messages, friends requests etc, you can delete them all but they simply come back. As a Scotch video advert once said in the 1980's, "re-record not fade away".
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