What are the recent changes I've noticed on Socratic?

1 Answer
Mar 1, 2018

Hello, Socratic community!

As you may know, we recently updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, a request from our lawyers.

Many of you accepted the updated terms—thank you! There are others, though, who may have missed our email or didn’t accept. (If you're using the site right now, you have accepted—so no worries!)

Many of these folks are people who once participated on Socratic, but are no longer active community members, or only participated once or twice in the past.

This means that the accounts belonging to those folks who did not accept the new terms will be closed after site maintenance on Thursday, March 1, 2018 (also a requirement from our lawyers).

Most of Socratic will remain unchanged by this. However, there will be a few changes you might notice, which are the effects of removing those folks’ accounts from the site and thus removing their “footprints” along with them.

These changes include:

  • Some questions on the site will be replaced with a question ID number, which will look like this:

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You’ll see questions like this on question pages, in question feeds, on featured answers, and even on your profile.

This will be the case when someone who asked a question on Socratic didn’t accept the terms, but the person who wrote the answer did.

Also:

  • Any activity from accounts that have been closed will be gone
  • 1:1 conversations you’ve had with people whose accounts have been closed
  • Thank-you notes from people whose accounts have been closed
  • Notifications from people whose accounts have been closed

And:

  • Answers that you edited, but were written by someone with a closed account, will be gone
  • This means that some links in the "edits" tab on your profile might lead to nowhere

Aside from these changes, there may be other things that look wonky after we’ve re-opened the site post-maintenance. Please let us know if you find anything amiss or have any questions, and we will do our best to make any fixes you need.

Thank you for bearing with us through these changes. But most of all, thank you for your incredibly special contributions to this community. Go learning!