Should users be able to delete their own post and not have to rely on asking moderators to do so?

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  • Yes, you should be able to delete your own post made on the site.
  • No, you should be required to ask a moderator to delete your own post.
  • Other (Please leave a comment)

0 voters

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This shouldn’t even be a question.

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I agree but it is the state of the site

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personally im undecided on this

the default behavior for discourse is to not allow users to delete their own topics once there are replies (you can still delete individual replies). This is because you are not only deleting your own content, but other users’ content as well. EDIT: i think it also prevents deletion after a certain period of time

the current way to get a topic w/ replies deleted is to flag it and get a mod to do it.

You also potentially mess with linking and referencing across the site. That’s why when users ask to delete their account, we also have the option to anonymize their account and keep the content up instead of deleting everything and leaving holes where their content used to live.

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@hugecat I understand where you are coming from and agree with the points you’ve made. Any user can edit their original posted topic, wipe the material from the post and save its changes. They are effectively deleting their own content. However, this causes a hole as you’ve pointed out, and in addition to that. If the user decides to do that with multiple posted topics. They cause an unnecessary process of creating multiple holes and flooding the forum with spammed delete edits. This results in much-unneeded clutter when a simple user-enabled delete would be a much more viable option.

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you are correct that someone could manually edit their post. (the default setting was to prevent edits after a few hours actually)

so right now, de facto, the way users delete their own posts just includes a deterrent and/or mod check, which isn’t necessarily a terrible thing

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moving this to site feedback

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YES! That would be good.

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One use case brought up in (FOR SALE) Handy new in box (EU version) - #6 is deleting old sale posts.

I just enabled the “solved” feature but it doesn’t apply retroactively to older sale posts. I still lean towards solving/closing > deleting, but this is one use case where I think you could make a good case for deletion. But this decision would be site wide so you can’t just apply it to #general:sales

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oops did I accidentally delete this topic?
@anon63474100 this topic is a good example of a topic that I don’t think should be deleted if we can help it

1 Like