Delete replies (or have the option to do so) when using Schedule Publish via a topic timer

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

Continuing the discussion from Use a Topic Timer to schedule a topic to be published in the future:

I’m putting this in its own topic so it doesn’t^[1] get deleted by the topic timer on that topic.

As an organizer in a community which uses Discourse for communications, I would like to have private conversations about a scheduled topic, and not worry about those comments being published.

Usually, such comments are trivial — suggestions, corrections, etc., not really sensitive. They aren’t really worth preserving, either. One can remember to delete all of these before scheduling the topic, but that’s easy to forget, and there is (by definition) a window between topic’s scheduling and its publication, where new replies could come in and be forgotten.

Another possible solution, focusing on that last-mentioned problem: once a post is scheduled, do not allow more replies.

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1. with some of whatever kind of irony this kind of irony is, given the request ↩︎

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

Whilst testing Scheduling topics for future publication on our site, I stumbled across this too.

This is a real hole - some discussion about the draft is super useful as replies on the Topic. However, at present it is very easy to leave it there by mistake. This looks terrible, compounded by the fact that the timestamps are all reset to zero: