I normally wouldn't post something like this, but this is starting to get ridiculous and I want to rant about it.
Do you know what's the problem with modern age? Everything can and will be stored in the internet. That means bad things will never go away and they may even overshadow some of the better stuff, because somehow the interwebz mob is attracted to awfulness.
Why am I bringing this up? Well, recently I came across some users saying that it's a disgrace Jeff the Killer got deleted, because it's a classic. I'm sorry, but in no way is Jeff a classic. Classic doesn't have to do just with age. Classic is considered something that defined (and defines) a genre. Do you think that this story defines our genre? Every single story that is inspired by Jeff is deleted instantly because it's crap. So it certainly doesn't define creepypasta, and we certainly don't want it too.
So, I'm asking you this: Do we want Jeff to be the face of our beloved genre? Or do we want something of great quality to be remembered in the future as classic? The answer is pretty obvious.
In any other age, Jeff would have been forgotten. But in the internet age, crap gets stored and sometimes (as in this case) even worshipped.
Let me pose a different question: Do you really think that Edgar Allan Poe was the first person ever to write detective fiction? No, certainly not. But he is considered the grandfather of the genre because his work was exceptional. It survived the passage of time because it was very good. Thus, it defined a genre and is now considered classic. I'm sure there was a ton of other similar work before him, but it just wasn't that good, so it got forgotten. It used to be the best would survive. The great Poe came victorious against worse writers.
People saying that Jeff should be restored are only saying that because it's one of the oldest pastas. I personally haven't read it, but most educated individuals (on and off wiki) are saying it's a piece of crap. So why would any logical person want to make a crappy piece the defining work of a genre? Just, why? We are in the infant years of the genre. Genres last for hundreds of years. And we want to paint this in a bad light for the rest of its history because a piece of crap came a couple of years earlier than most good pastas?
I'm sorry, but that's plain moronic.
By the way, I'm not saying that always the best pieces become classics, there are more variables in the equations such as luck, fame etc. But that's besides the point.