Topic on User talk:Clump

Hi Clump, I see you are doing a lot of cleanup work, thank you for that. However, it irks me that you've unceremoniously deleted my talk page (https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&logid=21237856). As useless as it may have been, I cannot even *see* now if or how useless it was, because it's been deleted.

What's more, yesterday I received a mail that an IP user had left a message on my talk page. All of the links in that mail are no longer valid because the talk has been deleted - so I can not even see the message content, whatever it may have been. This is surprising and surprises of this type are not good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment).

I consider my talk pages mine. I'm absolutely willing to request their deletion when they actually are useless, and would welcome a suggestion to do so. I think it would make sense to leave it to users to post a deletion request in such cases. Yes, it would be slightly more work for both parties (user and admin), but it would better preserve users' responsibility for their stuff. I don't want someone else to clean up my property, I want to clean it up myself. What do you think?

Sorry for the distress, but that was just part of removing random page vandalism. The post was a sequence of random characters (probably cut & paste from charinsert):

  [] · [[]] · [[|]] · {{}} · – — · “” ‘’ «» ‹› „“ ‚‘ · … ~ | °   · ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → ² ³ ½ · § 

I appreciate the potential for loss of a meaningful interaction, but this transparently, trivially, not such a case. I'll bias toward leave more benign future, random vandalism on your page if you wish, but keep in mind your talk page here is meant for meaningful discussion on mediawiki-related topics, and is not an archive of nonsense.

Thanks for the specimen. "talk page here is meant for meaningful discussion on mediawiki-related topics, and is not an archive of nonsense." I fully agree with this of course, but still strongly prefer it if any vandalism is simply reverted. I want to see vandalism on "my property", even if the vandalism included creation of the talk page. It helps me adjust my knowledge, expectations and understanding of what happens and how often. When "my property" is deleted, I can not even know for sure whether there was just vandalism, or if the deletion was even in error.

The philosophy of talk-pages as property aside, waiting for users to confirm or deny nonsense/spam/vandalism on their talk pages is not a tenable policy in general. Your talk page was not being used for anything so deleting it was effective and quick. If further minor vandalism of your talk page occurs I will try to remember to just delete the post/text itself (rather than the whole page) so you can still check the history.

I would appreciate that, thank you. To clarify, I was not asking or suggesting to wait for confirmation or denial, or objecting to anyone removing spam ASAP from any page, including my talk page or anyone's talk page. I solely am in favor of by default reverting spam changes via normal edits, *in particular* on anyone's talk page, so that we can see this in the history. Only in exceptional circumstances should such history be deleted, for example if the spam were very dangerous, and this was not such a circumstance.