http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/09/30/my-comment-deletions-policy/#comment-16…
I was surprised by how surprised they were when I said no. As I fruitlessly explained to them over and over again, “You own your own words. You don’t own the conversation they’re a part of, and you don’t have the right to deprive it of its sense and context by removing them later.”(The point of owning their own words was that we wouldn’t alter or re-use their comments for some other purpose. We might disemvowel them, but the disemvowelled comments were left in situ, with all their consonants intact.)