So this data will not be losted forever? Also, do you mean that all data and all posts made by users should belong to admins only and only admins should decide what to do with it?

Those are the terms usually.

If it's a forum, I assume not all of the content is created by the owner.

> Do you maintain a freely-available repository of all of your knowledge and experience, in case someone else wants to consult it one day?

No, but I try to maintain some of it, and I see the value in maintaining as much of it as possible.

I do actually but it is up to the person. The main reason for me to encourage it is that if knowledge is reserved for the high priests it will eventually be lost. How many civilizations did we build by now? No one knows! We haven't the records. The stuff people must have figured out. Of course may would pretend it wasn't a big deal but all those deleted forums had plenty of insights to offer. Practical ones and historically valuable.

The real value of knowledge doesn't change if you duplicate it or make it widely available. On the long term, blocking access and rent seeking doesn't create value, it destroys it. It seems useful for the individual who wants to pay their bills or for the one with insatiable greed but in the end it will makes us stupid.

For example: I would like a high quality UV-B lamp that isn't INSANELY expensive. They are pretty ordinary lamps but developing the coating is very expensive. The work has been done tho, lots of times, over and over again. Most results are just bad.

About 35% of the US and about 1 billion globally have vitamin D deficiency, 50% has an insufficiency: Fatigue, Not sleeping well, Bone pain or achiness, Depression or feelings of sadness, Hair loss, Muscle weakness, Loss of appetite, Getting sick more easily, etc

Great loss of economic productivity or more opportunity for me? You decide!

if the "worth" skill X depends on no one knowing how to do X then it's not truly valuable, just gatekept.

They're not, but blocking all bots, also blocks others, that want to archive all that data forever, be it a private person using wget, or a service like archive.org.

You can manually copy locally the content you may need

Why would I, it's online, I know where to find it... until it's gone from there. Also, that would meen I'd have to archive it before I actually needed it archived. And archiving would have to be done manually. And after it's gone, and the only proof of it existing is a text somewhere else saying that the solution to my problem is here -> LINK and the link is that, the data is gone. Not even on archive.org.

Have we really come to a phase of internet use, where everytime you see something, you have to manually save it, and on every post (even here or on reddit, facebook r wherever) a link is not good enough, but you have to copy-paste the whole block of text just to make it a bit future-proof?

we never left that phase dude.

Yes, whatever you see on the internet is temporary. Save it if it matters because at some point it won't exist.

If I contribute time in answering questions or solving problems, like with mailing lists still being available to view, something that I intentionally put into the public domain with the intent of helping people should remain available. Just because a forum exists as a business to someone doesn't mean that the content has no value to the general public. The forum itself has no value, only the only content has value, which is what draws in the traffic to make money in the first place.

Call it what most forums are: an ad-supported business. People generate content for the owner for free because they too derive value from the information that others share. The middleman is just a middleman.

To not allow that content to be indexed/cached/archived/mirrored whilst making money off of it is pretty scummy in the long-term. There's tons of forums I used to visit whose information is now forever lost, that included a lot of very useful programs for niche bits of kit, which is now otherwise very expensive e-waste.

> Why are forum admins beholden to archive their data in perpetuity in case someone wants free advice or knowledge?

Because otherwise their work was wasted.

> Do you maintain a freely-available repository of all of your knowledge and experience, in case someone else wants to consult it one day?

I would if I could, I’ve already contributed what knowledge, bandwidth, and money I can to the Internet Archive. What about you?

> While the openness of the (now-ending) early days of the internet was liberating and allowed knowledge sharing on an unprecedented scale, the downside is the huge devaluing of that knowledge and skills.

I cannot even process how wrong this is. Objectively the preservation of knowledge and skills is a good thing, and you cannot devalue knowledge, which is itself priceless.

> Because otherwise their work was wasted.

This argument really makes no sense. If I tell Bob how to fix his transmission down at the local diner, but nobody records the conversion, that wasn't wasted work. But fixed his transmission: mission accomplished.