FAQ and Policies

Since computer networking's inception, LGBTQ individuals (such as Tom Jennings or Mary Ann Horton, to name a few) have been key players in the development of digital platforms. From the 1980s onward, sysops (short for system operators) of various identities created and nurtured communities online, where individuals could network, find support, and access vital information.

However, the rise of commercial web providers like America Online and then social media platforms shifted attention and prospective members away from these smaller, ad-hoc spaces, which were often labors of love for their hosts. By collecting information and documents from this period, the QDHP provides necessary context for understanding the full scope of LGBTQ “net history”.

The QDHP uses both Dublin Core and custom project-specific metadata schema, often in combination, to catalog both Community Catalog entries and Born-Digital Objects. For more detail on how certain terms are applied, see our Genre Vocabulary.

The QDHP follows a policy similar to the Digital Transgender Archive: whenever possible, content is categorized using terminology derived from the document or contemporaneous descriptions. While it may not always reflect current preferred terms nor offer a particularly neat, organized taxonomy, this practice does aim to avoid retroactively applying labels to individuals or spaces who might not have identified with them—a politically fraught act.

The QDHP focuses on LGBTQ-specific (or closely related) fora, websites, and other online spaces founded prior to 2010. While LGBTQ online spaces continue to thrive after 2010, we limit our chronological scope to cover periods that are not well preserved by existing organizations like the Internet Archive. For more information on what we catalog, see our Catalog Inclusion Flow Chart; for more information on our collecting scope, see our Donation Acceptance Evaluation Flow Chart.

There are also objects the QDHP never collects:

• Private communication between individuals unless both parties have given written consent to the QDHP for the files to be archived

• Individual postings to communities as single files unless they are either directly related to group structure (such as FAQs or group statistics) or contain group history narratives.

In most cases, content hosted on the QDHP will always be publicly available. However, complete archives of a community, when available, will come with some form of access restriction outlined on the object page itself.

Generally, the QDHP does not assert copyright over any object held on the site and operates from a position of fair use, prioritizing making materials available for noncommercial educational and research purposes.The copyright status of objects will vary based on their type:

• Community Archives The copyright status of messages posted to communities will vary based on both the platform’s policies (if they exist) as well as the author’s country of origin. When possible, the QDHP works with community stakeholders or copyright holders to secure permission to share copies. However, individuals may request their messages be removed from a collection (see policy below).
• Born-Digital Publications and Software: When possible, the QDHP makes good faith efforts to work with rights holders. If any materials in the QDHP are found to violate copyright law, the QDHP will take down the material immediately.

The Queer Digital History Project respects individuals' right to be forgotten, both in terms of legal statutes like Article 17 (specifically the right of erasure) of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and as a general ethical practice. Individuals who believe their messages might be held in one of the QDHP’s collections may request they be removed. When submitting a request, please email admin AT queerdigital.com with the following information:

• The specific collection(s) you are requesting removal from
• The username/handle(s) used in the posts
• All possible email addresses attached to posts
• A general time window in which the posts were made (i.e. a specific span of months or years)
• Other identifying information that would assist the QDHP team in identifying your posts

Once a request is received, the QDHP works with requestors to ensure they feel their privacy is protected. In some cases, this may mean information is redacted from messages and replaced with “REDACTED.” If the concerns cannot be addressed with redaction, messages may be removed from a collection, at which point they will be replaced with “THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED AT THE REQUEST OF THE ORIGINAL POSTER.” If access to one of the collections in a request is itself by request only (so it is not posted publicly), requestors will be provided copies of messages that meet their requesting criteria to review.

Note that some objects held by the QDHP, like the AIDS INFO BBS collection, are drawn from other sources like the Internet Archive and thus not exclusive to the Project. While you are more than welcome to request removal, the QDHP cannot and does not engage in universal de-listing. Moreover, while the QDHP team will make a good faith effort to remove messages, guaranteeing total removal may not be possible depending on, the size of a given collection, whether its messages include standardized metadata, and the original platform/format’s approach to message quoting (as whole messages could be reproduced when quoted in replies).

Currently the QDHP's costs are covered by its curator, Avery Dame-Griff. If you would like to donate to support our work, you're welcome to donate to the project's Ko-Fi.

Please feel free to suggest a community for inclusion using this form. If you have materials that might be interest to the QDHP, please email the project directly at admin AT queerdigital.com.