Ability to delete forum content?

[dddddecorating]

Hi,

Noticed a post made here appears in search engine results (at least for Google). This is unexpected behavior —I'd like to avoid public-facing discussion/information tied to my accounts. So I guess I have two questions:

• Can users delete posts/content, or can heliohos, if requested? (I couldn't see where to do it if so..)
• Can users delete Forum/HelioNet accounts without affecting login/account credentials for heliohost?

Thanks!

[Unknown025]

We don't consider usernames or posts to be personal information. You can find more details here: https://wiki.helionet.org/FAQ#How_does_community-powered_support_work? As for deleting your forum account without affecting your hosting account, that's a good question for an administrator.

[wolstech]

No. Users cannot delete their own content. We can hide topics from visibility on our side, but you would have to request that individual topics be hidden. Generally, the idea is that topics are left in place so others can learn from people's experiences.

It is possible to request we delete the forum account without affecting the hosting account, however having a forum account that matches your hosting account makes support much easier if you ever need it.

[Krydos]

12 hours ago, dddddecorating said:

Noticed a post made here appears in search engine results (at least for Google). This is unexpected behavior

This is exactly the behavior we hope for.

Since we're a small non-profit powered by donations and run by volunteers we don't have a staff of full time employees writing and maintaining a knowledge base or similar documentation, nor do we have a full time staff of paid employees answering user questions. The whole concept of HelioHost is to be a community of web hosting developers helping each other with questions, and helping each other learn. The most helpful users get offered a promotion to enable them to help others even better. All of our volunteers, myself included, started out as regular users who read other people's questions and decided to start helping others out without being asked to or paid to.

If all of our forum posts are hidden and only admins can see them then it defeats the entire process, and would block anyone from learning from each other or even having an opportunity to help each other.

Another consideration is since we are a small non-profit powered by donations we don't have enough money to afford advertising, so the only way people will even find us is via free sources such as search engine results, or 5 star reviews. For instance, maybe someone out there had the same issue as you, and stumbles on your solution that was posted on our forum, not only do they find out how to fix the same issue that they're having, but they may start looking around our website and realize that we can host their website for them too, etc.

Another thing I want to mention is how the recent obsession with "privacy" hurts the internet as a whole. 10 years ago Reddit used to be a really great resource of community based help for common issues. Fast forward to 2026, and I refuse to even click Reddit links in search engine results because the plague of redaction has made Reddit, not only completely useless, but a frustrating waste of time to even look at, due to everyone constantly deleting our replacing their helpful posts with random gibberish. I understand stuff like "oops I accidentally posted my email address, and now I'm getting tons of spam", but removing helpful information that benefits everyone is just cruel. I honestly think Reddit should start banning people who redact their posts like that.

[dddddecorating]

Hey all, thanks for the replies! Deeply respect the volunteer work you do here and 100% support the goal/ethos of community-based forums. I guess my concern is born from a site security perspective, although I may be naive?

In my particular case, the indexed content is the "domain addition request" requested by helios, which seemed a more ticket/procedural type of content, vs a helpful knowledge base question?

But when indexed, the result is a sort of ghost whois entry made public, showing who's tied to the domain, where it's hosted, etc. This just felt a little too revealing, but I'm sorta new to this!

My original sense was the initial request to create a un/pw for the forum meant forum content was gated (to forum members). But that is 100% my misunderstanding having now read the wiki. (Also my fault for picking a UN that matches my domain..)

So with all that said, where should a user make a request to have content considered for deletion? Is that a direct message process?

Thanks!

[wolstech]

You can post a topic asking for a domain or the like to be redacted, but it really doesn't make much sense.

DNS will show where a domain is hosted unless (quite-significant, especially if email is needed) effort is made to completely hide where the site is hosted. Even then, attackers don't necessarily care where it's hosted, as most attackers are just using bots that go looking for things like unpatched Wordpress installations to break into...those methods of compromising a site are mostly the same regardless of hosting company, and the mitigations are also mostly the same (install updates when they come out, don't use software from dubious websites, etc.)