To clarify, "old posts are getting deleted," yes, but as far as I know, they're being deleted by the forum members themselves.  Many people went through and either have (or want/ed to) gone back through history and deleted their own posts.  Imagine how time-consuming that could be!!!
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Thank you! I guess I will wait and see. A pity if this concentrated well of knowledge would be gone.

I don't see how it's any more unethical than for a male to use a female pen to gain access to the vast majority of the M/F romance market. Either way you're presenting yourself as someone you're not in order to gain access to a market where readership bias might otherwise prevent your books from being read.

Agreed. The whole hassle about pen names of the opposite gender or another sexuality is very hard to understand. That's like saying Robin Williams' movies have ceased to be watchable now that we know that he wasn't as funny inside as he pushed outside.  Williams' smiling facade is what sold his movies to the majority of people.

He wrote some of the stories drawing me to SciFi as a youth. Fabulous writer.

Welcome to the WWDS-- the World Wide Double Standard.  Some people don't like peaches because they're juicy and messy, but don't have a problem with watermelon, even though the same qualities apply.  Other people take offense at horror movies/video games because of (for one thing) the common damsel-in-danger trope, but don't have any problem with superhero movies/games with the token female character in a tight, form-fitting costume.  Getting back to the fruit metaphor, it's called cherrypicking.

I'm quite aware of the hypocrisy of it, or I wouldn't have pointed it out. In this very thread are people who, when the negative influence of certain romance and erotica were pointed out, withdrew to the exact opposite point of view regarding books and their influence compared to now. Which is what amuses me.

Nobody has removed the books from schools, libraries, Amazon, or anywhere else. They are still available and sold and nothing is restricting access to them.

It is a slippery slope. First obliterate the name, then retcon the books, then remove them entirely.

All that has happened is that the people who oversee the award have said, "We have decided, in 2018, that the award should reflect the nature of the children's book community as it is TODAY, instead of clinging to a worldview that is over a century old and does not reflect the diversity of modern children's book writers."

This isn't a bad thing, regardless of how some may want to spin it otherwise.

Unfortunately this is neither the intelligent, nor the intellectual, and most assuredly not the best way to deal with the past and its culture. No one says people should "cling to a worldview". The intelligent and civilised approach is to teach, not to ban or censor. It is the cheapest approach, though.

Yes, but the way fiction conveys cultural values (of all types) is too complex to boil down to whether the narrator/characters explicitly endorse those values, IMO. There's a complicated interplay among the narrator's tone, explicit versus implicit endorsements, the way the plot and character development lean on values, the reader's established attitudes toward the characters who espouse values, and probably other elements I'm not thinking of. For instance, if an utterly loathsome character makes a racist remark, the reader is probably likely to see that remark as bad, even if the narrator doesn't point out that it's bad. But what if a beloved character says or does something racist? That might be a murkier situation. ....

At this point I am starting to find the whole thing extremely amusing. 

I can't count the times that I have been told, and in no uncertain tones, that fiction is fiction and not reality. Usually the inciting topic wasn't Laura Ingalls' ma's racism. Instead it was the abuse in Fifty Shades of Grey, the misrepresentation of reality in romance or the sexism in erotica. The moment you reflect on rape culture, or the distortion of the gay experience, or the abuse and torture porn so prevalent today in romance and erotic fiction, and widely read by youths and young adults, that's the exact answer you get: "But it is not reality. It is fiction, and we can discern reality from fantasy. Books do not influence anyone. We can consume what we want."

And now this gets turned around, because now it is helpful to some other agenda? People really need to make up their minds. It is either this or that in this case. Not both.

It's all part of the "brand", isn't it?

People choose pen names to promote their works. And they usually choose something that either is memorable or fits the target genre somehow.

I have no problem with the dudes taking on female pen names to write their romances. I don't do it (I don't write in that genre), but I don't care if they do it.

It must work as a tactic, or they wouldn't continue to do so. It's the same with the phony bios used. It's all part of the marketing, all part of the branding. If it didn't work, they wouldn't continue to do it.

Some of the other stuff mentioned here on KBoards -- male authors using female pen names and asking female readers to tell their secrets -- yeah, it looks creepy. But that goes above and beyond writing/branding/marketing.

It's rare, but I do agree with all that.

I draw the line at the same place, though I don't think it's just "a brand". Online personae have been existing ever since Arpanet.

Personally, I'm a bit concerned by this trend of judging the work or actions of people who lived in radically different historical times through the lens of the present. For a few reasons - for one, I worry about the slippery slope implications. First we remove Laura Ingalls Wilder from the name of a children's book literature award, when she was one of the pioneers of that genre, because some of the statements or
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Look, I understand that this is a slippery slope argument, and most mainstream folks aren't advocating for removing classic literature that doesn't sit well with modern sensibilities. But I feel this is a step down that path. And I'd much rather keep these important books and people in the curriculum and discuss their books and the context of their views rather than trying to shove them out of sight.     

I agree with all of this. And such behaviour, revisioning the past to comply with the (too often too hysterical and absolutist) present is what is giving people engaged in doing this a bad name. It's nothing less than active censorship.

I'll add two points:

Ingalls-Wilder's books are very present all over in print. There will be no final retconning of her stories, just as that will be impossible with Twain, Shakespeare, Kipling or Blyton. Unless someone starts burning books again. Modern authors often don't have these enormous print editions to fall back on. Even with trad published authors you get runs of just a few thousand physical books, and indie authors often only have electronic files. As of now there is no institution which keeps original files truly securely filed for all time (forget national libraries, because obviously they aren't tamper proof either). Revisioning our books will be child's play.

I recently wanted to read an unedited (in this instance indeed negatively revised) version of a short story by an author friend. She had suffered a bad hard drive failure, so she had lost all files. And now only the edited (in her case edited to quite undeserving sensitivities) version is left. This will be how the future will remember her work. Not the way she created it and now adhering to morals and fashions not worthy.

The second thought I have is that future generations will not even have the chance of learning from the past. The effect is already well-known regarding history taught only from the perspective of those who won the wars. How much worse with the distortion become, if we strike any adversary opinion from books just so that children never have to engage a brain cell?

You won't stop such things as racism or sexism by obliterating every hint of it. It's truly not as if our current time has become so enlightened that we can afford not to show children and youths what certain behaviour caused and how people formerly thought. How should they ever conclusively compare their own behaviour towards migrants with how the people of Twain's era thought of black people? People learn by example, bad as well as good examples. The civilised way would be to print footnotes, and not to rewrite books.

If you send your story to an online critique group you have no control over it any more, because hundreds of people now have copies.  Critters used to email me stories every week, so deleting it from the web site would be pointless. And even if it's only on the web instead of downloaded, people can copy-and-paste: they pretty much have to be able to do that in order to critique it.

There's a difference between individual copies with individual critique partners and someone keeping a story or excerpts of a story published against the wishes of the creator. These are very distinct and different things.

Someone using a critique site can be fine with one, and not so much fine with the other. It doesn't automatically follow.

I left Critters a long time ago, but it's been around for decades and one of the best critiquing groups on the Internet.

Well, if a critique forum doesn't respect copyright it can't be among the best, it won't even be just adequately "good". The very first thing I'd expect anyone working with my texts to respect is my right to decide what happens to them. That includes what happens to them behind a password wall or in a database accessible only be members or administrators.

In the time I was at Critters, I asked them several times to remove a very early version of a story from their database. They said they couldn't/wouldn't. As far as I can see, this stupid policy runs counter to the GDPR requirement: that users can delete themselves from the site. It's the main reason I left Critters.

In that case nothing much is lost. A writer/critique group not respecting copyright law is no good thing to be in anyway...

I know it when I see it. I don't need bad algorithms to work that out for me. It is easy enough to pinpoint the books which were marketed with ARC and street teams, and it is also easy to see which have shady aka solicited/bought reviews. Both show me I shouldn't be buying that book regardless of how much hype it gets.

Can we say that this is because you're an author?

That is possible. But again, there are also a lot of very sensitive readers out there. Recently, I have noticed a generalised "malaise" with many romance sub genres and the output flooding readers. Readers are definitely aware of book stuffing and the background of it.

The first time I got hit with a $4500 tax bill on royalties, I was shocked.

I do not think anyone has a problem with income tax. It is logical, it is easy to pay, it is a one-stop thing, and you know what you're in for when you start earning any sort of income.

Being knowledgeable of and applying hundreds of different taxes and taxation levels is something entirely else. The typical small one owner business on the street, meaning your normal shoeshiner, hot dog vendor, flower girl or icecream seller has little more to do than hand over their bills and income sheets to a mediocre, low pay accountant and is done with everything. The problem is: this is not anymore sufficient for someone doing business in a similar manner over the internet. No cover designer located in Brixton is able to afford the internationally savvy legacy accountant they would need to be sure that their entire business arse is covered.