Mod note on 'Mystery [REDACTED]'

Have been going back and forth with Rhaomi in email this morning and here's a summary of what's going on:

The large quantity of FPP posts that zarq created would have meant removing a lot of contributions from other people who have participated in the threads. Manually removing the personal information would have required a lot of manual work.

So a new script was developed by Rhaoni (over several months) to go through a user's posts and remove the content of the person requesting an account wipe, while preserving the comments and links that were made in those posts.

Here's how that process works, explained to me this morning by Rhaomi:

The only things remaining from the original FPP are 1. the title (which is part of the URL), 2. the tags (which are a shared site resource), and 3. the raw URLs from the post. Everything else written by the user requesting the wipe is erased, including any original writing that could possibly identify them. The original post text, no matter how long or how simple, is replaced by a brief independently-written one-line description of the topic for context.

This process was developed by Rhaomi over the past few months to comply with any account wiper's request, while still keeping the links and comments of those who had commented on the post.

This new script was run last night on zarq's FPP posts on Metafilter.

That's what I know and understand as of this point.