Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to know the answer to this question.
Yeah so would I. Actually, I've often thought there should not be a restriction on the window during which you're allowed to delete a post on this site. I understand that there are reasons they might not want that such as to encourage civil interactions and so forth. But I still think there should be no restriction on it. There are things I've said in discussions I've had here that were not always well informed or mo…
About a decade ago I was involved in building what became for a short span one of the best cinephile discussion boards on the Internet. Aside from HN, or maybe MeFi I can't think of any forum that sustained a signal-to-noise ratio of that quality for that long. It was night-and-day better than IMDB boards.
Naive and idealistic as we were, we have users full control to edit/delete posts. Over time we tightened that to have time limits, etc. But there was one big loophole which was you could delete your entire account and it would purge all your posts. Eventually one of our most prominent members with thousands of posts decided to (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. The result? Utter incomprehensibility of half the threads, effectively rendering the history useless if not downright misleading.
I get that the pendulum has swung too far and users deserve more control of their data, but a public forum is fundamentally a different thing from a social network—a forum thread is different from a post in that the value of the thread is communal, it should not be owned by the individual in the same way that it makes sense for a social media post to be. And even in that case, I think most of the problem comes from the giant many-tentacled nature of Facebooks and Googles where the data doesn't even come from directly entering it in and it's incredibly difficult to even visualize what they have. For a simple forum I think it's perfectly reasonable (and clear!) to have ToS that state: you post it, it's here forever, barring special requests due to extreme circumstances or legal reasons.