Greetings SCP users,
Over the course of the last few months, it has come to our attention that several pages on the SCP Wiki have become, for lack of a better term, broken. Such pages become uneditable, and will display a common error screen, as demonstrated below:
Such pages currently include, but are not limited to:
A common theme for these pages breaking has been frequent posting to the page slot, and then deletion of the page (ie the slot serving as a frequent destination of cold posts, etc). Renaming the SCP prior to deletion has so far been an effective means for staff to preserve the main list SCP URLs. However, there is still the risk of self-deleted pages irreversibly breaking the slots.
As such we are putting a temporary hold on complete user self-deletions in favor of soft deletions.
What this means:
- Pages hitting the deletion threshold will still be deleted by staff as normal, with the addition of the renaming workaround.
- Authors cannot manually run a complete self-delete of an article. Instead, they will soft delete it (ie renaming the article so that it is deleted:scp-XXXX)
- Articles moved to deleted:scp-XXXX cannot be edited, renamed further, or have their files altered except by moderator staff or above.
- Staff will run these deletions, no questions asked, so as to preserve author autonomy.
An example of what this will look like in practice:
Please understand that we would not be instituting this unless it was absolutely necessary, and do so out of interest of preventing further SCP slots from becoming irreparably damaged and closed to all users to post. Additionally, note that this is only a substantial concern for SCP articles which have the potential to go through multiple post-deletion cycles and not tales/other articles.
Thank you for your time, and understanding.
Jacob Conwell
Moderator
MAST Deletions Section Head
