Deleting your sets

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Deleting your sets

Published by on March 5th 2013.

In the past months, multiple icon and cursor authors have asked me why they cannot delete their own sets and wished there were a button for this. Today, there is a solution. Sort of.

Why deleting of sets was not possible?

There are multiple reasons:

  1. Security - this web site is not particularly secure. User names and passwords are sent un-encoded when you are logging in. If someone learned your password and there was a "Delete" button, they could easily delete everything you have uploaded. Restoring it would mean a lot of work for me.
  2. Reliability - once you publish a set, it is on the web. People may access it, they may talk about it and they may share a link to your set or add it to their favorites. Don't you hate it when suddenly a link that worked for months or years stops working? RW-Designer wants to be reliable and deleting sets or even changing their link is not the best way to achieve that. Links to published sets are automatically shared on Twitter and Facebook and we all hate dead links. History shall not be changed.
  3. Community - you may think that the set is yours and yours alone. But in that case, why would you publish it? In the real world ;-), author is only a part of the equation, the audience is as much important as the author. After multiple people have spent time reviewing your set, added more or less helpful comments, downloaded it or otherwise interacted with it, they may be upset if you delete the set and all their contribution with it.
  4. Spamming - new sets get on the gallery home page and reposted on social networks or emailed. By repeatedly deleting and re-creating a set, users may attempt to spam the news channels.

So, deleting is now possible, yes?

Yes, but not easy. Due to all the reasons stated above, deleting of your own sets is discouraged. If you decide, you still want to delete your set, here is what you must do:

  1. Get a "Set dissolvent" from our trusty gnome trader.
  2. Use it in your workshop and select a set to dissolve.

This action will not delete the individual icons or cursors (you may do that afterward - there has been a link for this in your profile for years), but it will irreversibly delete the set description, download count, ratings, comments and view count.

I will not delete any sets myself anymore (except those breaking copyright).

Recent comments

user icon MariaPiu registered user on March 5th 2013

"3.Community - you may think that the set is yours and yours alone. But in that case, why would you publish it?"

Because, I never imagined it existed a site that wouldn't allow the user to delete their own content. Because it's really absurd and of course at the page it doesn't say a word about it, not even in small letters. How naive I was. I should have been more paranoid. This "the author is only a part of the equation" talk, is bull, this is just to promote your website. I was even thinking in making a donation but Im changing my mind.

user icon cdl contributing user on March 5th 2013

Unique way of dealing with the problem.
I can see how these requests to delete sets may get a bit overwhelming when you are already pressed for time and have so much to do, and a life outside of the website. So we now can purchase the option to delete the set designation. I probably will leave the ice cubes in the piggie-aqua set for the time being but it is nice to know that when I am ready to change that there will be an option by which I may.

To address the ownership issue, this is not totally unfair. The website is free and we are not required to pay any fees for uploading our content. For the most part we do have control over our content and always have. We have always been able to remove icons and cursors from a set and then either move them to another set or delete each one individually in the junkyard thus removing them from the website. The only thing that has changed is that we can now delete the empty set the content was placed in.

Sharing your content in RW Graphics is a voluntary act, you are not required to share any content. You are not even required to only use RW software to create your content. Membership is totally free. The website administer only wants to protect your content from unscrupulous people seeking to destroy your uploaded content with all ratings, comments and download statistics included.

If your account in the RW website were to become compromised the culprit would not be able to delete your set ratings, comments and download statistics with the website settings of past. Now they could if the required payment to the gnome is available and they know all the steps involved in doing such a dastardly task. It is not such an easy task but it is possible.

This change is a good thing, not a bad thing, if you want the freedom to delete your sets completely or make major changes in the set designation.

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Thank you for the change in website policy Vlasta.
I am sure we will enjoy the added freedom in managing our sets.
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user icon SYNTHCRѺ contributing user on March 8th 2013

This is nice, but to be honest, I had no problem with old method. :-)

user icon cdl contributing user on March 18th 2013

True, I worked with it.
The problem was when people could not delete the set page and thought they could not delete their own content as they pleased.

Now there is no reason for such misunderstandings.

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user icon MariaPiu registered user on March 31st 2013

SYNTHCRO, you tried to delete an entire set before this new method? (the "Set dissolvent") Because it was NOT possible, I tried myself. You could delete all icons or cursors BUT 3 icons or cursors, so the set would still be there with only 3 items. If wasn't like that why so many people were complaining about the old method like Vlasta said in the "Suggestions For the Site" Forum and why would he create this "Set dissolvent"? I don't know what cdl is talking about, maybe it was like that years ago when the site begun and she is confused.

Read this cdl and SYNTHCRO http://www.rw-designer.com/forum/1674

There Vlasta answers to JDDellGuy on January 2nd 2011

"It is true that cursor sets cannot be deleted at this moment, but I am considering allowing it to trusted users."

And on Feb 17th 2013 cdl suggested the following in the same forum

"I would like to nominate myself for the list of users with ability to delete their content. I will assume responsibility for any content that I may loose as a result of my actions."

user icon Anonymous
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I wish there were...
What about ICL files?