I’ve just created a test user, logged in as tem, posted a first test post, but can’t delete it. Is this intended? [image] UPDATE Apparently so. I can’t delete my own posts here on Meta either. Is there a setting to control this?

Creating a topic like “nazi hitler porn” and then immediately deleting it is a great way to grief a site. Also, deleting a topic with replies would be rather rude to the people replying. This has been covered at length in other topics.

Let me disagree. What I can see in my forum: people start a new topic, then understand they did something wrong and it’d better to post a message into an existing topic (we have a single topic for selling things) and tried to delete the topic but can’t. So a person is looking at the topic and can’t understand what to do. What does he/she do? He/she posts another message into the topic with words like “what a hell, how to delete the topic?”. So the reasoning “deleting a topic with replies would be rather rude to the people replying” should take into account the fact that all messages in the topic belong to the same user. Moreover currently (v1.8.0.beta7) is not allowed to delete own topic for users with TrustLevel=1 even if there’re no replies! Is it on purpose? That looks very strange. I’d not argue about whatever it’s correct or not and how it should be by default. But I think it should be possible to change the default behavior and allow people to delete their own topic. Is there any workaround to do this?

[image] Shrike: Is there any workaround to do this? Yes: Teach your users to flag their own topic if it needs moderator attention, for example to be moved to an existing topic :slight_smile:

I’m afraid it’s very idealistic approach :). I believe good UX should provide “less-surprise” approach and not assume and impose “people should taught first” idea. There’s common sense - if I created something I should be able to delete it. Even in Twitter we can delete own tweets. I understand reasoning that it’s a bad idea to wipe out topics with conversation. But I think it should be allowed at least during some adjustable timeout after creation.

[image] Shrike: But I think it should be allowed at least during some adjustable timeout after creation. I don’t agree – deleting a topic is quite a disruptive action. What happens to the users that are currently reading it? Typing a reply to it?

[image] fefrei: I don’t agree – deleting a topic is quite a disruptive action. What happens to the users that are currently reading it? Typing a reply to it? But it’s allowed to delete own message. No problem here. What would you say in the same case - what happens to the users that currently reading it? So we agree that a person can change his/her mind after posting a message. But the same is applied for topics. Actually I noticed that non-technical people often hard to distinguish topics and messages, they treat them in similar way..

[image] Shrike: What would you say in the same case - what happens to the users that currently reading it? Exactly what happens now: The message is replaced by a note that the author deleted the post and it will be gone in 24 hours. If I want to continue reading it, I check the edit history. The core difference is: If a reply is deleted, the topic is still there. There’s still a place where replies can exist. I can even effectively “capture” parts of a post and prevent them from being deleted by quoting them. When a topic is deleted, the entire discussion is wiped from the planet. Replies can no longer exist, because the space where they should be was burned to the ground.

Well, but moderators/admin can delete topics. And the fact that someone is reading it or replying doesn’t prevent deletion. So from reader’s point of view is makes not much sense who is deleting the topic. But again there could be some meaningful timeout while it’s allowed (5-10 minutes for example). It’d reduces the confusion. How it could be improved for the case when a topic is deleted right while it’s being read by someone: The author who is not admin/moderator deletes a topic, but it isn’t wiped out immediately. Instead it’s scheduled to be deleted in N minutes. All people who is reading or replying to the topic will see a notification “Author have deleted the topic”. If there’s a reply posted in a topic already then author won’t be able to delete the topic, instead he/she will be presenter with a message “You can’t delete the topic as there’re already replies in it, please flag for moderator instead”.

UPDATE Users can now elect to have own topic deleted per: [image] User cannot delete own topics once they have replies Feature This is done in: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/7267 Thanks @nbianca !

User can't delete their own topic

Product Support

fefrei (Felix Freiberger) March 13, 2017, 9:55am 6

I don’t agree – deleting a topic is quite a disruptive action. What happens to the users that are currently reading it? Typing a reply to it?

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