Articles Not Deleted

1. 62

   eugbugposted 2 months ago

   I came across one of my articles in a Google search, complete with ads, that I seemingly deleted from my account. The chances are there could be lots more.

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      SerenityHaloposted 2 months agoin reply to this

      Can you tell us a little more about the article and where it appeared? I’m interested in any details you want to share.

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      1. 62

         eugbugposted 2 months agoin reply to this

         It's this one. I deleted it from my account and it's not listed there, but obviously it's still available to anyone with the link.
         
         https://discover.hubpages.com/living/Co … ock-Washer

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            Venkatachari Mposted 2 months agoin reply to this

            I think it is due to clicking on older links you shared with others.
            
            The articles might still be in the archives.

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            1. 62

               eugbugposted 2 months agoin reply to this

               It's actually a live link though and turns up when I google it. So either there's a flaw in an automatic deletion process, or when we delete an article from our account page, it just removes the article from the list, and behind the scenes, a request is sent to the team to delete it. For another article, when I went into author view, nothing was displayed, and I had to contact Matt who put in a request for it to be deleted. But nothing happened. So I contacted him again. Eventually it got deleted a few days ago. Now I'm wondering how many more are still out there, or how to track them down.

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   2. STAFF

      Matt Wellsposted 8 weeks agoin reply to this

      Email team@hubpags.com. Include links to the articles you would like deleted.

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         theraggededgeposted 8 weeks agoin reply to this

         So we have to search for all our previously published articles even though we deleted them manually months ago?

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2. 84

   Jodahposted 2 months ago

   That is very concerning.

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3. 62

   eugbugposted 2 months ago

   So another article which I contacted Matt about appeared to have been deleted in the last few days. Now it's back online. I told TAG on X that I was serving them with a DMCA takedown request.

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      SerenityHaloposted 2 months agoin reply to this

      I have somewhat of a guide on how to approach TAG with takedown requests, which includes the right email addresses and such. I know you have no problem figuring this out, but thought I’d put this here in case someone needs it:
      
      https://medium.com/academic-adjacent/wa … f020510cb6

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4. 62

   eugbugposted 2 months ago

   It seems now that deleting and unpublishing articles from the account page is no longer working.

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      SerenityHaloposted 2 months agoin reply to this

      I actually can’t open anyone’s profile right now besides my own. It’s concerning that you’re finding these deleted articles.

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         eugbugposted 2 months agoin reply to this

         I should qualify that with "some articles".

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            SerenityHaloposted 2 months agoin reply to this

            How many have you found so far?

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5. 62

   eugbugposted 8 weeks ago

   I'm using ChatGPT to do a search through all the categories on Discover and trying to get it to build a list of articles deleted from the account page, but still online.

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      SerenityHaloposted 8 weeks agoin reply to this

      Fascinating. How many of yours have you found so far?

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         eugbugposted 8 weeks agoin reply to this

         Five not deleted so far.

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   2. 59

      theraggededgeposted 8 weeks agoin reply to this

      Can you share the prompt, please?

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      1. 62

         eugbugposted 8 weeks agoin reply to this

         I attempted to get it to do it, but it was somewhat ineffective and didn't generate a comprehensive list, only finding 42 posts. This is the long and convoluted conversation:
         
         https://chatgpt.com/c/6a89630f-01dc-83e … c896f7f606

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      2. 62

         eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

         I'm going to try this approach now. Our profiles show a blank page and they're no longer indexed by Google. However, in theory, it would be possible to get ChatGPT to go through a Wayback Machine version of a profile, before someone deleted their content and use that. Now unfortunately, the links on the WBM point to archived copies of articles, ChatGPT should be able to strip off the wrappers around the addresses though.
         
         

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         1. 62

            eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

            So this has actually worked. ChatGPT had difficulty directly accessing my archived HubPages profile on the Wayback Machine, because the site has become incredibly slow. It kept timing out. So I told it I would try and view the profile myself. It took a couple of minutes to load the webpage, and another few minutes to save it to my desktop as files were drip-fed by the WBM. Once I had the HTML file, I told ChatGPT to read it and extract the addresses, which it did and gave me a CSV file listing them all — one column with the article names and column with the URLs. But I want it to do more donkey work and make it even easier for me, so I was going to get it to makeup a table with the hyperlinked article name and the second column having the article status — still live at the original Hubpages Discover address, or giving a 404, indicating it's no longer online. However, I ran out of chat time, so have to wait until tomorrow to do that.

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         2. 62

            eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

            So it generated this nice spreadsheet for me, and sorted the articles in alphabetical order as requested. I haven't checked yet whether it actually checked the online/deleted status properly. That would take ages.
            
            So basically what you need to do is go to the Internet Archive, AKA the Wayback Machine at https://archive.org.
            
            Enter your Hubpages profile address in the search box.
            
            You'll get a calendar, showing bargraphs of saves for each year.
            
            Click into the year, then hover the cursor over a highlighted day in one of the months on the calendar that appears.
            
            The time of the snapshot is displayed. Click on that and wait for your profile to load.
            
            Save the webpage. It's best to do this onto desktop as you can check whether the homepage HTML file has appeared yet (it can take a couple of minutes. ChatGPT says there's a way of speeding this up by using a key combination that only downloads the homepage HTML file and not the auxiliary folder which always accompanies a webpage when it's saved and includes images on the page, JavaScript and CSS files etc).
            
            Give ChatGPT the homepage file. Tell it you want it to go through the file and extract all the addresses of the articles shown in the file and to build a list, with accompanying status of those articles— still online, giving a 404 etc. It has enough intelligence probably to understand what "addresses of the articles shown in the file" would mean, although I had previous discussions with it, so you may have to explain it a bit better to it.
            
            You can probably get it to display a table within the ChatGPT chat, rather than as a separate CSV or XLS spreadsheet file.
            
            Now I've checked whether those statuses are actually correct in the file and some articles report as deleted and returning a 40 are actually still online and vice versa, so I'm working on getting it to fix that.
            
            
            

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            1. 59

               theraggededgeposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

               Forty live articles! That's crazy.
               
               It's a lot of work though. I'll have to try it when I have a few hours to concentrate on it.

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                  eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

                  It found all my articles and the links, but as with all AI, ChatGPT is always super confident about having done something properly, but those status results are erroneous. I had a new discussion with it and it explained the reason why, but I haven't got back to getting it to fix the list. Anyway Matt has reported back that the ones that weren't deleted have been properly removed now.

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                     SerenityHaloposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

                     I’m happy the articles are getting deleted. It’s still a weird situation, but at least they’re still complying with these requests.

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                        eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

                        I meant my ones that I notified him about that weren't deleted. Not sure about deletion in general and whether there's now a wholesale deletion of articles that were not deleted properly from the account page. The only way to find out is to go to your old profile on the Wayback Machine and get a list there. However, as I described above, the profile page links to versions of articles in the archive, not those on Hubpages, hence why I was trying the ChatGPT angle and getting it to build a link list. (which it did, but it cocked up on the status check)

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         3. 60

            Jayne Lancerposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

            It seems you have a new profile page. As do Jodah and Peggy W. Interesting. https://discover.hubpages.com/eugbug

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               eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

               So I do. Very odd.

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6. 88

   Peggy Wposted 7 weeks ago

   I got a late start deleting my articles off of HubPages due to medical issues. Once I got started, I deleted each one as I copied and put them into draft form on another site. I am down to the last 87 articles, and they have eliminated my ability to delete them.
   
   So, I wrote to team@hubpages.com with the urls of those remaining articles and asked them to delete them for me. So far, nothing has happened.
   
   Since my articles all have copyrights with my name, if I shut down my HubPages site, will they automatically be deleted from the site? Any ideas?

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      eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

      I still have the option to delete if go into author view.
      Are your articles on the network sites rather than Discover Hubpages?

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      theraggededgeposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

      I think your articles will remain, Peggy, even if you delete your account.

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7. 88

   Peggy Wposted 7 weeks ago

   I had all of mine moved to Discover. All the remaining ones, when I go to author view, it pulls up a blank white page. Nothing shows. I can view them (not on author view), but cannot delete them.
   
   So far, no response from team@hubpages.com
   
   Is there any other email address I can use to request them to be dropped from the site? I appreciate your response.

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   1. 62

      eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

      that's odd. I have a delete button in author view. I haven't checked them all though. one of them showed a blank page. Then a couple of weeks later, i could view the author view. So far though, there's no movement on deleting my articles. TAG has no urgency to do so, presumably because they're making money on them.
      You could try privacy@thearenagroup.net.

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8. 88

   Peggy Wposted 7 weeks ago

   Thank you! I will try that email you suggested. I really appreciate your advice.

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9. 88

   Peggy Wposted 7 weeks ago

   I tried the privacy@thearenagroup.net and it said it was not a valid email address.

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10. 88

    Peggy Wposted 7 weeks ago

    I just tried sending another email to privacy@thearenagroup.net, and this time it went through. Hoping this works! I also sent a similar request to morgan.fitzgerald@paradium.ai

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    1. STAFF

       Matt Wellsposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

       Your articles have been deleted. You only need to email team@hubpages.com.

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11. 62

    eugbugposted 7 weeks ago

    Matt has just let me know that my articles have been deleted.

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12. 88

    Peggy Wposted 7 weeks ago

    I got responses from team@hubpages.com that all of my articles were deleted, but all of them are still showing up as published. I answered each email that they are still live. I wish they would activate the author view and let us do it. Hopefully, someone will eventually do it properly.

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    1. 62

       eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

       You may be seeing Google's cached version of the articles. Refresh the page in your browser as shown (Apparently, according to AI at least, simply using the refresh button on a browser doesn't always pull the live version of a page from the website. It may get it from the browser cache). Google eventually removes cached versions of articles, but you can go one step further and ask it to remove cached copies here:
       
       https://search.google.com/search-consol … ed-content
       
       
       

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13. 88

    Peggy Wposted 7 weeks ago

    Hi Eugene,
    Thanks for all of your help. When I simply went to my articles, they all appeared live until I hit the refresh button individually which brought up a 404 notice. I found one lone article that still needs deleting and have asked team@hubpages.com to do it.  I feel sure they will do it since they have now helped with all the others. Thanks again for your advice! Best wishes to you!

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       eugbugposted 7 weeks agoin reply to this

       Thanks

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14. 62

    eugbugposted 8 days ago

    I emailed the team the week before last and the articles mentioned still haven't been deleted.

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