The discussion revolves around disabling the deletion or withdrawal of posts on Discourse after a certain time period. 1kevgriff initially requests this feature for a client, to which sam responds that it’s a reasonable request but unlikely to be implemented due to its rarity. As an alternative, sam suggests writing a plugin or archiving topics to prevent deletion.
However, the conversation shifts towards implementing a site setting to achieve this functionality. codinghorror requests specific examples of the problem being solved, which are provided by md-misko and 1kevgriff. riking suggests a review (self-)deletions older than minutes setting, but codinghorror prefers to modify the existing max_post_deletions_per_day setting to allow a value of zero.
1kevgriff offers to submit a PR for this change, and codinghorror confirms that the work is already in progress. Ultimately, Roman_Rizzi merges a PR that allows max_post_deletions_per_day to be set to zero.
Hello all!
I’m working with a client who wants to prevent the deletion of posts after a time period. We have a grace period enabled for editing, and I had assumed that carried over to deletion as well.
My search of meta and of the settings isn’t turning anything up. Is there something I’m missing?
Thanks!
Odd this is the first time I have heard this request, it does sound like a reasonable request to me, but given it is so rare I do not think it is going to find its way into the product for many years.
As it stands your 2 options are
Write a simple plugin that introduces this, would probably only be 10 lines of code. You can commission it on Marketplace
Archive topics where you want to disable deletion. End users can not withdraw content from archived topics.
Ha! I appreciate the response. I definitely agree it’s not worth the time if I’m the first to ask about it.
I’ll use this as an opportunity to try my hand at some Ruby dev and see if I can build the plugin myself.
Would you be open to a PR for this? (wrapped in a site setting)
I prefer @codinghorror weigh in first.
delete time limit (default to 1440 minutes) ?tl2 delete time limit (default to 43200) ?This would mirror post edit time limit and tl2 post edit time limit
Can we take a step back here? What’s the goal? What problem are we solving, can you provide specific concrete examples?
I guess the argument is that somebody starts greefing by deleting 3 year old content they posted.
In practice I have not seen this, but I guess it could happen.
This happened multiple times on our forum, usually when users are already disciplined by silencing or locking to TL0 (to prevent them from posting without review), so stricter setting for bulk deleting old posts would be appreciated.
Yeah, exactly. In our case, it’s within a day or two (granted, it’s a niche community, but deleting posts disrupts some of the conversations so my clients would like to disable that ability for non-admins).
A setting would be amazing.
I’m pretty sure our existing ratelimits on deletion have successfully stopped self-deletion rampages before they get too far - that was the original goal. However, there’s a really low chance that moderators actually notice the ones that did go through.
Perhaps a review (self-)deletions older than minutes setting could do this job? Note: Having an active Reviewable on the post will prevent the self-delete from completing.
Good point - max_post_deletions_per_day would be nice if I could set it to zero.
Our use-case isn’t rampant self-deletion, it’s single post/topic deletion after a period of time that is negative towards the community.
Yeah that’s the best solution here @sam .. I don’t really want more site settings for this.
Hope everyone had a great holiday!
Is this as simple as changing the min on max_post_deletions_per_day and max_post_deletions_per_minute to zero in site_settings.yml? If so, I’m happy to do that PR myself.
Yes, I believe @eviltrout has assigned this work so it should be in place soon.
I merged a PR to allow setting max_post_deletions_per_day to zero: