Board Thread:Administration/@comment-24376429-20140208190533/@comment-1196539-20140209014851

For old stories that are bad, have no historical significance, and have just lingered on the wiki due to neglect for the past several years? Get rid of 'em if you want, I have no opinion.

For marks of creepypasta history? Absolutely not. Even if you delete them, they're not going anywhere--the only decision you're making is "do we want to have Sonic.exe here, in the logical place for people to come and look for it, or do we want the whole internet pissed off at us because they had to dig around Google until they found some random guy's blog that had the original reposted because we didn't think it was important that they be able to find it here."

Which itself raises another important question. But before I can pose it, I need to elaborate on where I myself am currently standing a bit. I have not myself read the original posting of Sonic.exe (purely as an example), and have taken it completely on faith that it's utter garbage--by this I mean, it's full of grammatical abortions and typos. Because purely as a story, it's a bad creepypasta, but there are far, far, far worse on this site and elsewhere, and most of .exe's flak is due to the fact that it's so popular, and people like to exaggerate how bad it is to counteract those who overrate it. Not only that, but the fact that it was made into a proper product shows commitment on the author's (or at least the community's) part.

Now, assuming that my assuming is correct and the posting is just an abysmal example of how not to write a creepypasta, then will deleting it from this site really discourage people from posting more such submissions? Or will it give it more power? Will it make it more mysterious, or even idealize it since people aren't seeing the horribly-typed nightmarish reality and are instead just seeing playthroughs of the game and other such representations? Is this any different for other bad pastas--ESPECIALLY lost episode pastas, which are all over YouTube? Isn't it better for people to be able to find and see the actual pastas themselves, so that they can think, "Wow, this guy types like a second-grader with brain damage?"

Bottom line: Good or bad, many creepypastas hold a place in our shared history. World War II was a dark time in human history, but that doesn't mean we should burn all the records from that time. We need to keep them. Learn from them. That will do a lot more to improve the future than pretending they never existed (which will incidentally also make us look like a very silly website).