You know what,
Hobby, it probably IS silly to keep every announcement we ever create. Those facts are very temporal... what was important for everyone to know last month is incredibly useless info next month.
Right? Right. Right!
But it is, I believe, part of our HISTORY. Our evolution. Where we were dictates who we are now and guides where we go tomorrow. Perhaps I'm feeling a little butterfly-effect-ish today... I feel that seemingly little things can cause big, and sometimes unexpected, effects somewhere else. Sometimes much further down the road.
It is important to know just exactly what those little things really where, as emotions and the effect of time on memory can easily rewrite history.
Some of the reactions in the Thread-We-Shall-Not-Name seem to me not a reaction to the fact we left that thread readable, but a reaction to the fact that not all of the OTHER threads it references are readable. That people are left to wonder what the Sam Hill was said in those invite threads, for example, that were so frequently referenced but now are gone.
Therefore, I'm not sure that this maelstrom is a result of our attempt at transparency, but instead a result of imperfect transparency.
The imperfections in our transparency were, unfortunately, necessary. The deletion of the invite threads was not only the right decision, but the necessary decision. They were the vestiges of a previous incarnation of this board, and they needed to go away.
But from here on out, we need to try to be historically transparent. IMHO. We need to preserve the trail of EXACTLY where we were, what we wrote, what was felt and shared, however temporal those thoughts seemed to be at the time.
Because the danger in someone trying to GUESS what was written is very, very high.
<steps off of soapbox>
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In other words, I like the ballot just fine.
Edited: for punctuation.