Would like to allow user to delete their own topic indefinitely. Not the arbitrary within 24hrs timeframe.
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Why? What is the reasoning behind this?
What advantage is gained from it?
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So they can delete after 24 hours. I don’tknow how to make it more clear. Sometimes no one answers a post for weeks. 24 hrs is arbitrary. And I don’t think flagging to beg a mod to do it should be needed.
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Are you only concerned about the case where there no replies from other people?
(There’s a problem if conversations can be deleted at any time.)
Afaik They can’t delete at all if there are replies, so i don’t understand your question.
As I understand this request is totally same functionality what Facebook groups are using. An user can delete own post when ever wanted so. If deleted one started a topic/thread then every posts will be deleted too. If deleted one is a post that has replies, those replies will be deleted too.
Well, admin’s choise if such move will be allowed. Not asked, but in Facebook that is heavily hated becuse then one person can delete anothers work at same. In my FB-groups such action will lead immident kick out of that group.
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Perhaps that’s why it is a feature request 
Ah. Still, it might be clearer as a feature request that it’s unanswered topics which you’d like to make deletable.
There are schools of thought that say a person’s contributions should always remain under their control, but I think the view in the Discourse team is that the conversational record is more important than the individual’s freedom to change it. I personally agree. But if you take another view, it may be that a feature can help you.
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Do you mean the
(topic deleted by author, will be removed after 24h)
marker?
I don’t think so. There is a hardcoded limit for users without special permissions which limits deleting their own topic to 24 hours.
After that, their only option is to flag it for deletion.
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It’s much easier than to deal with GDPR sues later on - let’s have user their data soverenity
I think that’s the important distinction here. The existing implementation already restricts ordinary users to deleting their own topic only when it has no replies:
So the narrower feature request could simply be to make the currently hardcoded 24.hours configurable, while retaining the existing posts_count <= 1 restriction. That could default to 24 hours but allow admins to choose a longer period, or potentially unlimited deletion of unanswered topics.
I don’t think GDPR is really the reason this feature is needed. The right to erasure is not absolute, and it doesn’t mean forum software has to provide an unlimited self-service option to delete any content a user has posted.
The configurability of the existing 24-hour restriction seems like a sufficient argument for the feature on its own.
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A data point from a forum that runs into this constantly.
I administer a smaller forum with a classifieds section. Across its for-sale, wanted and trade categories there are 12,343 topics. Of those, 5,669 (46%) have never received a single reply. Only 2,609 (21%) got a reply within the first 24 hours.
I think that supports @Ethsim2’s narrower version. The two conditions in can_delete_own_topic? test different things, and only one of them tests what we care about. posts_count <= 1 asks whether a conversation exists. The 24 hour timer asks nothing: at the moment it expires, 79% of our listings have no reply, and 46% will still have none years later. Its practical effect is to take a permission away from the authors of topics that nobody ever answered.
The everyday case is a listing whose item has sold. The author wants it gone. They can edit the title to “Sold”, or flag it and wait for a moderator. Our moderators do the second one by hand, which is make-work on both sides.
One oddity, rare but strange. Last week a moderator replied to a listing to ask the author for a clearer title. That reply took posts_count to 2, so the author permanently lost the ability to withdraw his own listing and had to ask staff to do it. Only 26 of our 6,674 replied-to classifieds topics have staff-only replies, so this is an edge case rather than a real problem, but it is odd that a moderation note revokes an author permission.
A site setting for the limit, defaulting to 24 hours and leaving posts_count <= 1 alone, would cover all of this.
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