I have a quick question. There’s that grace period where you can edit your posts without it showing up in the edit history. Is there a reason (other than preventing accidental deletions) that deleting a post within that grace period doesn’t delete it right away, as opposed to marking it for deletion in 24 hours?
AI-generated summary
Deleting a post when within edit grace period discussion revolves around the reasoning behind not immediately deleting a post within the edit grace period. seanblue inquires about the purpose of marking a post for deletion in 24 hours instead of immediately deleting it.
Simsnet suggests that the 24-hour delete time allows others to view the topic before it’s deleted and gives forum staff time to investigate hateful messages. However, seanblue counters that this doesn’t necessarily apply when only a single post is deleted and notes that people often read deleted messages before they disappear, potentially spreading hateful content.
codinghorror explains that the true reason for the 24-hour delay is to prevent griefing, where a user posts inflammatory content and quickly deletes it to evade flagging.
There is a short grace period for editing with no history, and a longer grace period for editing with public history report (anyone can see changes).
I personally feel that the 24hr delete time allows for anyone to view the topic for a short period before no one else can, or to allow forum staff to investigate any hateful msgs.
It could also just be a deleted post. So a whole topic isn’t necessarily going to disappear.
In my experience people tend to read the deleted message before it disappears. Sometimes people delete messages when they think more on what they just posted, but if the delete history is there people will still read it (allowing more people to read the hateful message, if that’s what it was). Maybe the posts could still be made visible to staff, but not regular users. 
I’m not necessarily asking for the functionality to be changed by the way, I’m just curious what the reasoning was.
The reasoning is that deleting posts is a great way to grief people.
Post “Hey you all suck and you’re idiots!” as a topic (for max visibility) then delete it before people can flag it.