#WordPress site deletion

[techcofinds]

[serankpro]

How to Delete a WordPress Site and Vanish From the Web

You’ve deleted the files—but your site still shows up on Google. Sound familiar? That’s because deletion isn’t just technical—it’s reputational. Learning how to delete WordPress site content thoroughly means knowing where your site lives beyond your server: cached in search engines, archived in public databases, and stored in metadata.

If your goal is full erasure, not digital limbo, it’s time to go beyond file deletion and explore the full lifecycle of content removal.

[seven-thewanderer]

yall, remind me so I don’t forget:

I am going to make a new side blog for my Flower Cows (since the old one’s a mess)

[techcofinds12]

How to Delete Wordpress Site

Deleting a WordPress site should be done with caution, as it permanently removes all of your site's content, settings, and data. Make sure you have a backup of any data you want to keep before proceeding. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to delete a WordPress site:

Before you begin:

Backup your site: Use a WordPress backup plugin or your hosting provider's backup feature to create a backup of your site's content and database. This is crucial in case you change your mind or need to restore your site later.

Export Content: If you want to save any posts, pages, or other content, export it using the WordPress export tool. This will create an XML file you can import into another WordPress site if needed.

[comicaurora]

hey so sorry to send another ask about the site fucking off but like uhm

i dont think its supposed to be like that

Fascinating. It looks like Wordpress has decided to put linebreaks before and after every link in an image caption and give me no way to turn this off. Absolutely baffling. Only way to unfuck the formatting would be to delete the reference links in every character description, which I do not want to do.

[wip]

After Tumblr's backend migration to Wordpress, will the entire content of all half of billion blogs will be deleted??

Answer: Hi, @garotaviciada!

It’s important to note here that this is just the engine running the site, and there will be no changes to the front-end. So no—we’re not deleting content. All of Tumblr’s blogs, and the content on them, will continue to be served, both at the blog address and in the apps. There will just be different tech running under the hood.

Perhaps the simplest way to say so is that, besides a bug or two here or there, how you know and use Tumblr will not change at all. We hope this helps clarify things.

As it happens, we have answered similar questions here and here in the recent past—they also might be of interest. Thanks for getting in touch, and keep the questions coming, folks!

[bihelel]

hi, I've began the process of deleting my patreon account and you can find all of my hairs here

for now I'm torn on whether to delete this blog but just in case I'll finish setting up a wordpress sometime soon and link my stuff there too, I'll also plop everything in that cc files site and probably mega

[wrestlingarsenal]

Today is technically my 4th anniversary here on Tumblr (although, in the beginning, my posts were few and far between because I had a newTumbl site at the same time which has since been deleted.)

My first Tumblr post appeared on August 3rd, 2021. It was a gallery of classic screenshots (including the one reposted here) from a 1986 bout that I've dubbed the "Last Great Wrestling Match." This hour-long Masterpiece of a match, between veteran Nick Bockwinkel and rookie Curt Hennig, was covered in great detail in a three part series on my old Wordpress blog. The full video is also available on YouTube.

So in total, I have blogged about pro wrestling on my original website for 9 years (2000 - 2009), my Wordpress blog for 10 years (2011 - 2021), and now for 4 years here on Tumblr (2021-2025). That's a quarter century of wrestling analysis and commentary, yet I still haven't been able to put into words why I'm so obsessed with pro wrestling...

[stjohnstarling]

Full text of article as follows:

Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. 

The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.

The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasn’t supposed to. It is not clear from Gage’s post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent. 

Gage wrote: 

“the way the data was queried for the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI means we compiled a list of all tumblr’s public post content between 2014 and 2023, but also unfortunately it included, and should not have included:

private posts on public blogs

posts on deleted or suspended blogs

unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered)

private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public)

posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know)

content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.”

Gage’s post makes clear that engineers are working on compiling a list of post IDs that should not have been included, and that password-protected posts, DMs, and media flagged as CSAM and other community guidelines violations were not included.

Automattic plans to launch a new setting on Wednesday that will allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and internal documents. A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled “What happens when you opt out?” states that “If you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.” 

404 Media has asked Automattic how it accidentally compiled data that it shouldn’t share, and whether any of that content was shared with OpenAI. 404 Media asked Automattic about an imminent deal with Midjourney last week but did not hear back then, either. Instead of answering direct questions about these deals and the compiling of user data, Automattic sent a statement, which it posted publicly after this story was published, titled "Protecting User Choice." In it, Automattic promises that it's blocked AI crawlers from scraping its sites. The statement says, "We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control. Our partnerships will respect all opt-out settings. We also plan to take that a step further and regularly update any partners about people who newly opt out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training."

Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, “Do we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?”

Andrew Spittle, Automattic’s head of AI replied: “We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believepartners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.” Automattic did not respond to a question from 404 Media about whether it could guarantee that people who opt out will have their data deleted retroactively.

News about a deal between Tumblr and Midjourney has been rumored and speculated about on Tumblr for the last week. Someone claiming to be a former Tumblr employee announced in a Tumblr blog post that the platform was working on a deal with Midjourney, and the rumor made it onto Blind, an app for verified employees of companies to anonymously discuss their jobs. 404 Media has seen the Blind posts, in which what seems like an Automattic employee says, “I'm not sure why some of you are getting worked up or worried about this. It's totally legal, and sharing it publicly is perfectly fine since it's right there in the terms & conditions. So, go ahead and spread the word as much as you can with your friends and tech journalists, it's totally fine.”

Separately, 404 Media viewed a public, now-deleted post by Gage, the product manager, where he said that he was deleting all of his images off of Tumblr, and would be putting them on his personal website. A still-live postsays, “i've deleted my photography from tumblr and will be moving it slowly but surely over to cylegage.com, which i'm building into a photography portfolio that i can control end-to-end.” At one point last week, his personal website had a specific note stating that he did not consent to AI scraping of his images. Gage’s original post has been deleted, and his website is now a blank page that just reads “Cyle.” Gage did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. 

Several online platforms have made similar deals with AI companies recently, including Reddit, which entered into an AI content licensing deal with Google and said in its SEC filing last week that it’s “in the early stages of monetizing [its] user base” by training AI on users’ posts. Last year, Shutterstock signed a six year deal with OpenAI to provide training data.

OpenAI and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment. 

Updated 4:05 p.m. EST with a statement from Automattic.

[ask-all-the-doctors]

I got a huge chunk of new followers yesterday because someone reblogged one of my posts from 2012. Thank you and it's nice to see people still care about this old blog. :)

A question that has been on my mind for quite some time is what should I do about this blog? I'm not interested in continuing posting, I haven't done so for several years. I've mostly kept it for sentimental reasons, it chronicles well the experience of being in the DW fandom around the 50th anniversary in 2013. It's a time capsule to go back through the posts and makes me smile at the memories. Is there any ask blogs left like they used to exist ten years ago? I still see a few RP blogs using variations on the format, but I'm not seeing artists making silly little drawings and comics in the askblog format anymore. So I want this to be preserved in some way for the time capsule it is, since it still resonates with people.

[explosionshark]

that's what i meant: the campaign tried hard as hell and we didn't even get a season 5 😒

i'm gonna be sooo honest with you. i'm 100% positive i liked and read both of those when they were first published because i also have Artificer & 'Phile on my list, but i cannot for the life of me remember details of either fic. i hesitate to rec anything because i haven't reread any of these in like a decade. here's some i have saved:

Pretend not to be by ladyshinkicker (lj) - a post-s3 fic where hg comes back as a ghost. angst AND humor, i think?

A Unique Eulogy by tenacious-err (hm deleted from lj, but let me send you link for the waybackmachine) - post-s3, myka says goodbye to hg. ah, that's right... i'm a sucker for these kinds of scenarios.

Timeless by aniklachev? - it's a post 4x01 romance/case fic that i can't find anywhere else now that the wordpress site is down. so, i'm afraid it only exists in downloaded copies now.

The Sleeper Wakes by hardseeds (ffnet) - a series of vignettes post-s3? the summary's kind of vague lol

Continuum by MykaWells (ao3) - not a bering and wells fic. i remember liking this because it was one of the very, very few fics that actually had leena as more than a minor role. unfortunately, she's still dead.

i also know there were a LOT of fun tumblr ficlets (and full on chaptered fics), but i cannot recall a single one right now 😳

haha these all ended up being canon-ish fic. i think i just liked the angst and pain too much. enjoy!

i know there were canon fics i read back in the day but i think most of them are still on ff.net and damned if i can remember any of them anymore lmao

thank you for all of these, though! stoked to check em out.

here's the wayback machine link to A Unique Eulogy if anyone else wants to read it too

[technofeudalism]

Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is required to remove a controversial login checkbox from WordPress.org and let WP Engine back into its ecosystem after a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in its ongoing lawsuit.  In addition to removing the checkbox—which requires users to denounce WP Engine before proceeding—the preliminary injunction orders that Automattic is enjoined from “blocking, disabling, or interfering with WP Engine’s and/or its employees’, users’, customers’, or partners’ access to wordpress.org” or “interfering with WP Engine’s control over, or access to, plugins or extensions (and their respective directory listings) hosted on wordpress.org that were developed, published, or maintained by WP Engine,” the order states. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg asked for his account to be deleted from the Post Status Slack, which is a popular community for businesses and people who work on WordPress’s open-source tools. 

“It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack, according to a screenshot viewed by 404 Media. “I'm sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀” Mullenweg began to publicly denounce WP Engine in September, calling the web hosting platform a “cancer” to the larger Wordpress open-source project and accusing it of improperly using the WordPress brand. He’s “at war” with WP Engine, in his own words.  In October, Mullenweg added a required checkbox at login for WordPres.org, forcing users to agree that they are not affiliated with WP Engine. The checkbox asked users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” The checkbox was still present and required on the WordPress.org login page as of Wednesday morning. Automattic and Mullenweg have 72 hours from the order to take it down, according to the judge’s order.  WP Engine sent a cease and desist demanding that he “stop making and retract false, harmful and disparaging statements against WP Engine,” the platform posted on X.  Automattic sent back its own cease and desist, saying, “Your unauthorized use of our Client’s intellectual property has enabled WP Engine to compete with our Client unfairly, and has led to unjust enrichment and undue profits.” WP Engine filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. In October, Mullenweg announced that he’d given Automattic employees a buyout package, and 159 employees, or roughly 8.4 percent of staff, took the offer. “I feel much lighter,” he wrote. But shortly after, he reportedly complained that the company was now “very short staffed.”   All of this has created an environment of chaos and fear within Automattic and in the wider WordPress open-source community.  Within 72 hours of the order, Automattic and Mullenweg are also required to remove the “purported” list of WP Engine customers contained in the ‘domains.csv’ file linked to Automattic’s website wordpressenginetracker.com, which Automattic launched in November and tracks sites that have left WP Engine. It’s also required to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org, including reactivating and restoring all WP Engine employee login credentials to wordpress.org resources and “disable any technological blocking of WPEngine’s and Related Entities’ access to wordpress.org that occurred on or around September 25, 2024, including IP address blocking or other blocking mechanisms.” The judge also ordered Mullenweg to restore WP Engine’s access to its Advanced Custom Fields (“ACF”) plugin directory, which its team said was “unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent” and called it a “new precedent” in betrayal of community access. “We are grateful that the court has granted our motion for a preliminary injunction,” a spokesperson for WP Engine told 404 Media. “The order will bring back much-needed stability to the WordPress ecosystem. WP Engine is focused on serving our partners and customers and working with the community to find ways to ensure a vigorous, and thriving WordPress community.” A spokesperson for Automattic told 404 Media: “Today’s ruling is a preliminary order designed to maintain the status quo. It was made without the benefit of discovery, our motion to dismiss, or the counterclaims we will be filing against WP Engine shortly. We look forward to prevailing at trial as we continue to protect the open source ecosystem during full-fact discovery and a full review of the merits.” 

[amalasdraws]

Yeah, that ain't it I think it's time to delete all my art here

@staff this is a bad decision! Tumblr is a home to many artists, artists who help make the site what it is. Way to screw them over.

[blubberquark]

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?

[mariacallous]

Today, our information feeds and social media are largely governed by algorithms optimized to maximize engagement, often amplifying the most inflammatory content. With every view, like, and share analyzed to predict and steer our behaviors, we risk becoming subjects of surveillance and manipulation rather than active participants in civic discourse.

In 2025, we will start laying the groundwork for more empathetic and inclusive social networks, with the adoption of what I call “prosocial media.” This is media that doesn't just capture the attention of users but catalyzes mutual understanding between them. Media that empowers every voice, while fostering the capacity to listen across differences. Media that enables citizens to positively shape the digital public sphere.

One crucial aspect of prosocial media is the ability to allow people to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading information, thereby fostering a more informed discourse. Initiatives like Community Notes on X.com (formerly Twitter) and YouTube, for example, have successfully implemented this for public posts. A recent study, for instance, showed that Twitter Community Notes is an effective tool, reducing the number of retweets of potentially misleading posts by almost half and increasing the probability that a tweet is deleted by the user by 80 percent.

In Taiwan, Cofacts, a community-sourced fact-checking platform, is taking this concept further by empowering citizens to contextualize messages within private groups as well. Launched in 2017 by the civic technology community g0v, the platform was successfully adopted in Thailand in 2019. Research by Cornell University found that Cofacts managed to be quicker and as accurate in dealing with misinformation queries as professional fact-checking sites.

Prosocial media also addresses the centralization of social media platforms and the resulting unhealthy concentration of curation power in the hands of a few tech giants. It does this by using decentralized social networking protocols which enable content to flow seamlessly between different social media platforms. Last year, for instance, Meta’s Threads joined the Fediverse, a group of social media platforms that can communicate with one another, including Mastodon and Wordpress. This will eventually allow users on Threads to follow accounts and publish posts on other social networks. In February 2024, another decentralized platform, Bluesky (funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey) was also launched to the public.

Decentralization holds the promise of a more democratic internet, where people have greater control over their data and online experiences, leading to a proliferation of local communities, all interconnected through open protocols. This is increasingly valued by users. For instance, research at the University of Cincinnati found that users on decentralized social networks like Mastodon have joined primarily because they could control their information from data mining.

Breaking free of this attention economy will also require bold innovations in the very design of our digital platforms. In 2025, we will start doing that by using AI systems to help us prioritize content that promotes understanding and bridges divides, creating digital spaces that foster genuine dialogue rather than conflict. For instance, Stanford University and Jigsaw, the team created by Google to address global security problems and threats to open societies, have created AI tools that score social media posts and comments based on values like compassion, respect, and curiosity. In April 2024, they published research that demonstrated that ranking posts and comments based on such values significantly reduces reported animosity among users.

In 2025, a new wave of prosocial media platforms will finally start bridging the online divides, highlighting instead the common ground that unites us.