During your stay at the Backrooms, you may occasionally arrive at a page that looks like this:
Typically, you can get here via a dead link (like this one!) on another page, or while attempting to get to an article you knew about or had written. This means that the page in question has been deleted.
Articles can get deleted due to four primary reasons:
- 1.) Author withdrawal. The author of an article may, for any reason and at any time, desire to delete one of their written articles.
- 2.) Coldposting. Pages that have not received a greenlight will be summarily and immediately deleted by staff for failing to follow the process of quality control. This process will be summarized later in this guide, but is detailed in this page (which is not a dead link!).
- 3.) Deletion threshold. Articles require to stay above a certain threshold of community acceptance to remain on the site. This threshold is expressed as a rating of -1.
- 4.) Staff decision. Staff reserves the right to delete articles that break the rules of the site in other ways. This is generally not exercised: staff will not delete an article because of personal preference or bias.
The process behind the first three possibilities will be elaborated upon in this guide. Consult the table of contents below to skip ahead.
If you feel your article has been deleted unfairly, be it that you have correctly followed the greenlight process, or that your article was above the deletion threshold at the time of deletion, or any other reason, please reach out to staff.
AUTHOR WITHDRAWAL
You, as an author, have the inalienable right to delete your content from the site whenever you want, provided you are the sole author of such content. This can be done with the Delete button in the Options menu at the bottom of every page:
This menu is accessed by scrolling down, clicking "+ Options", then "Delete." Don't worry — this won't immediately erase the page. Instead, it will open a box with the text "deleted:" followed by the original URL of your page. Before proceeding to fully delete, you want to change the URL as indicated (this is to prevent the URL from becoming impossible to use — on occasion, a Wikidot glitch may completely lock down a page that has recently been deleted).
After that, repeat the process but click "Delete Completely" instead: after doing so, Wikidot will ask for your confirmation one last time. Click "Accept", and the page will be erased. Keep in mind no record will be stored anywhere. Make sure to make a copy before deleting! For the sake of record-keeping, please notify staff when you delete one of your articles.
Alternatively, you may request that site staff do it for you. Send a Wikidot or Discord message only if absolutely necessary, and make sure not to spam their inboxes! They may be busy or offline for a multitude of reasons, so be patient.
Official pages, guides, and articles created by other users, or in collaboration by other users cannot be deleted like this. You will only be able to delete pages if you were the one to first create them.
If you would like to delete a page you wrote in collaboration with someone else, you need their permission. In cases where there are more than two collaborators or the collaborators cannot be reached, exemptions may be made only with staff approval.
COLDPOSTING
In order to post an article of any kind to the site, you will need to go through a process of quality control. This process involves reaching out to a greenlighter, requesting them to read your article, and getting their approval (greenlight) to post.
This is to ensure a universal bare minimum of quality and make it easier to filter out unacceptably poorly written pages, such as those that feature abundant and blatant grammatical errors, or feature extreme misconceptions regarding the nature of the site and its content. Read more about the process of greenlighting here.
Should your article be deleted this way, you will be informed about it via your Wikidot account, and the text of your article will be preserved. Consult the "MESSAGING AND LOGGING" section for more specifics.
Note that for certain contests this rule may be voided: make sure to consult the rules of the contest before posting. Even in these exceptions, getting critique is strongly recommended.
DELETION THRESHOLD
The Backrooms Wiki has an up/downvote system of rating articles. This is the primary means by which content is accepted or rejected from the site, and thus is a way in which articles may be deleted.
The deletion or downvote threshold of the site is a rating of -1. This does not mean that any article receiving a downvote will be deleted: this will happen if the total sum of up and downvotes on any given article is not above a total rating of -1.
For example, if your article has 6 downvotes and 16 upvotes, the total rating will be displayed as +10, and thus will be safe from deletion. If your article has 6 downvotes and 5 upvotes, the total rating will be -1, and thus will undergo the process of deletion.
In line with our new threshold raise, a new grace period has been implemented for new articles. When new articles are posted for the first time1, they have a grace period of 48 hours/2 days from the time of posting, which means they will not be deleted should they hit deletion threshold during that time. IMPORTANT NOTE: This new grace period will not apply to pages posted before the new threshold was implemented.2
When an article keeps below -1, the article will then enter a deletion range check, in which it will have 24 hours to go above that rating before it is deleted and receive an 'in-deletion' tag on the article. If the vote goes up during those 24 hours, then the tag will be removed, but if it retains the negative rating, the page will be deleted.
In the time between the start of the counter and the final deletion of the article, any user may request the right to rewrite it from staff or the original author(s). Articles undergoing a rewrite will be tagged "in-rewrite" and are exempt from deletion by downvote threshold. You can read more about our rewrite policy here.
Once the counter reaches 0, if there are no requests to rewrite, it will be deleted by staff and logged appropriately (see MESSAGING AND LOGGING section).
Articles that have received a greenlight can still be deleted if they reach the downvote threshold. Greenlighters can approve of your article and consider up to site standards, but community members may still decide it unfit for the site and downvote it.
Although it is generally good-mannered to explain the reasons behind a downvote in the forum section of an article, this is not a requirement or obligation. You may reach out to individual users if you would like to know the motives for their downvote, but they are not required to answer or give any explanation. If they do not respond or request that you cease engaging with them, you have to do so.
This can occur for any number of reasons — misuse of the setting, poor syntax or structure, etc… —, but personal bias cannot be one of them. If you think someone is downvoting you for any reason but the contents of your article, please reach out to staff.
You are always free to rewrite your article and try again! You can ask for more feedback, ask different people, give yourself some time to think and regroup, etc. — Rome wasn't made in a day, and lots of really successful articles started out with the wrong foot. Don't give up if things didn't go as planned!
MESSAGING AND LOGGING
If your article is deleted for any reason but your own choice, you will be informed via Wikidot private message and the deletion logged in the deletions thread of Backrooms Oversight, the administrative site.
Private messages communicating the deletion of your article will look like this if it was deleted due to coldposting…
… and like this if it was deleted due to reaching the downvote threshold.
Together with these messages you will always receive a copy of the source code of your article.
Additionally, deletion logs look like this:
They will list the original URL, the reason for deletion, the date of the deletion, your Wikidot username, and have a collapsible containing a copy of the source code of your article.
