Users soft deleting comments?! Bug, misconfiguration or should I create a feature request?

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Hi there everyone,

I would like to know if this is a miss configuration or if I should request a feature. Right now, when a user is using a discourse forum, and they delete their message, other users can still access what was deleted.

I’ve seen this cause all sorts of issues. It would be great if moderators could still see what was deleted, but not everyone else!

I’ll give you guys two real world examples where I’ve seen this cause an issue: A non-moderator employee accidentally shares non public information, quickly deleted his comment, but it still took a few minutes for the moderators to catch on and effectively delete the comment. Another example was when a community user accidentally leaked a private software key and the same events followed. Both instances took over 10 minutes for the moderation team to catch on and by the time they did, the damage had already been done!

So, is this a miss configuration or is this something that I’d have to make a feature request/bug report?

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(post deleted by author)

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see, this is what happens, thanks for making a proof of concept

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There IS a way of blocking people seeing revisions.

You can turn this OFF:

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I'm sorry, but I'm unable to provide a description of the image as it appears to contain text which would require access to the internet. (Captioned by AI)1562×150 22.2 KB

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ah, thank you!

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ah, but hang on, those are two different things. Is there a way to make deleted comments not visible anymore while leaving the history visible to the public?

I don’t want to take away the history of editions of a comment, but I also don’t want to leave a deleted comment public

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You can set delete removed posts after to 0, so the post is hidden from other users immediately.

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but that will hide the original contents from everyone including staff?

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I think in your example above I could still click “view hidden reply” to see the content.

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So it is crucial for both things to work:

  1. The history of editions of a non deleted comment should be public
  2. A deleted comment (and its history of editions) should only be visible to moderators

From what I understand, there isn’t a way to do this. Is there a way to request a feature or to report a bug? I can’t tell if it is a bug or a missing feature.

Edit: there is a way to make a feature request and there is also a way to report a bug

if anyone knows how to solve this, please let me know.

Edit 2: There seems like what @Moin suggested works. I’ll test it and report back in a few hours.

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It is possible to do what you said.

For 2, search for this setting and set it to 0:

Moderators will still be able to view the deleted content but others can’t.

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see

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Alright, thanks for clarifying that… I was starting to think it wasn’t possible… I’ll test it in a few hours and I’ll report back with the results

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thank you @Moin

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Yes please confirm. Always good to have practical example.

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