I am new with this Discourse platform and I am trying to discover a little bit more the functions, how it works, etc.
In several occasions, it happened to be contacted by the users because they cannot delete a topic that they have created.
I’ve tried with a normal test account (non-admin) to create a topic and after couple of hours to delete this topic, it worked. Could it be that when the topic is recently created, it is allowed to be deleted, but as soon as is more than 24h, to no longer be able to delete?
There are 2 scenarios:
a) for some of the users, the delete option is not showing at all
b) for other users, the delete option is there, but when they try to delete it comes the message: “You have no permission to delete this topic. If you really want to delete it, …”
Where could I go more precisely in order to check the settings of the category or for the topics directly? I would really appreciate if someone could help me with some hints.
In general, users don’t have permission to delete the first post in a topic after someone has replied to it. Deleting the first post deletes the entire topic, so valuable replies could be lost too. That’s why they are told to ask a moderator. The moderator could split the replies to a new topic to keep them if needed.
To be able to delete replies or topics without replies, the user must be able to edit their post. The post is not removed immediately; it is first replaced with a “this post was deleted” text. The settings which control how long users are able to edit their posts are post edit time limit and tl2 post edit time limit.
Those topics that I am referring to don’t have any reply. They are only tring to delete the topic that they have created and that has no reply.
In my case, with the test account, it worked to delete it, after 3h. I have created another one and wait for longer until I will delete, couple of days, to see if the option is still available and if it will still allow me to delete.
I just want to confirm that indeed, if it passed more than 24h since the topic was created, it can no longer be deleted by the user who has created the post:
The message with “This post was deleted” appears only within 24h since the topic was created, when you use the “Recycle bin” option.
If it passed more than 24h since the topic was created and you want to delete, then maybe you could use the edit option, but you still need to write something in there, at least 20 characters, otherwise, without the help of an admin, you cannot completely delete the topic. At least this is what I see with the test account.
Are there any other options, for an user, to be able to completely delete their topic (topic that has no replies) if it past more than 24h since the topic was created?
I was wondering if you could guide me or tell me if it is possible to setup, only for a specific category, two users who could also delete topics that were created, without providing them admin or moderator access. Maybe just to create a specific group that have certain permissions only for that category.
are there any concerns around setting these to “0” so that users can always edit their posts?
it seems that allowing the user to edit the OP (first post in the topic) in order to remove the contents would be preferable to actually deleting the topic. Does that sound right?
in order to give users full control over their submitted content on the forum, it seems that the correct option here would be to always allow users to edit their posts regardless of how much time has passed.
I think the closest thing would be Category Moderators. These can be set per category, but they would have a lot more abilities than only topic deleting (including reviewing flags from that category).
Otherwise the delete ability granted from delete all topics and posts would be site-wide rather than limited to one category.
Users can edit their posts, for example to delete the entire content and to add something like “This topic is no longer available”.
Before it used to be a moderator and for this specific category he was deleting posts older than 6 months.
Now that person is no longer in charge and we wouldn’t like to grant full moderator access to the ones who will be responsible of deleting topics from this category. We would want them to manage only that category as a Moderator, but on other categories to don’t have Moderator permissions.
I think @JammyDodger provided a solution. I will check that.
Thank you.
I will check how can I add a Category Moderator.
It is ok if they can do many other things and not only deleting topics, as long as their access is limited to that category only.
I’m not sure we have a good guide on this yet, but you can enable category moderation using the enable category group moderation admin setting. Once enabled, you can then add a group to the category under the Settings tab in the category menus:
