Deleting permissions | Create new Topic

Hi, everyone.

My name is Andres Gomez, and I work on the SmartThings Developer Support team, so I am also an admin in the SmartThings Community. There is a valuable long-term user (more than 7 years) here in our Community that has been running into an issue lately. This user had an accident a long time ago, and as a result, he is now in a wheelchair with poor mobility in his hands. Although this accident happened before his arrival to our Community, in the last few weeks (probably after some update in the forum) he started to delete threads by mistake when trying to select posts from an already existing thread, with the intention of forking that thread. This means, an ongoing thread starts growing and a different started to be discussed in that thread, therefore, he tries to fork those comments into a new thread but he accidentally deletes that thread. We try updating his user level, but the only one with no deleting permissions is the lowest level, and since he is an active and valued member of our Community, we don’t want him to lose all his privileges. Is there any workaround to this issue? Is there a chance to move the Delete Topic button from the Select Posts... button? Is there a chance to add a confirmation step to the deleting topic flow?

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I think you can hide it with CSS and even make a user-selectable theme just for that user.

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Hello and welcome @AndresGomez :slight_smile:

I think your user may have been recently made into a Category Moderator to acquire the ability to delete a topic (only Category Moderators, Moderators, and Admin currently have the delete permission for content that’s not their own).

Normally if you accidentally delete a topic you can pull up the topic wrench again and undelete it in the same fashion, but I’ve just had a quick run-through on my test site and I notice that Category Moderators have the ability to delete a topic but don’t have the power to view deleted topics. This leads to the unfortunate position where if a Category Moderator accidentally deletes a topic the page refreshes and they then can’t get back to that topic to reverse the error.

As a workaround in the short-term you could make the user a TL4 instead as they have a lot of permissions that are useful, like global edit, splitting topics, closing, etc but not everything a Category Moderator has (like delete, or access to the Review Queue). There’s a comparison table in Trust Level Permissions Table (inc Moderator Roles) with more info in, if you want to check it out. :+1:

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Hi, Jay

How can I do that? I have never edited anything on the platform

See Theme Developer Quick Reference Guide or Beginner’s guide to developing Discourse Themes.

A simple way could be to hide it for all non-staff users by adding this to a custom theme component:

.topic-admin-menu-topic li.topic-admin-delete {
    display: none;
 }

.staff .topic-admin-menu-topic li.topic-admin-delete {
    display :initial;
}

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Hi, @JammyDodger

Thank you for this information, I am not sure how to implement that CSS change but I will investigate. About the TL4 user, I asked around, and he is already a TL4 user. That was the first action we take, changing his user level. But he is still able to delete topics, and he is not able to undelete them, which is weird because I was checking the Trust Level Permissions Table, and he should be able to delete topics. Do you happen to know why can he still do that?

Hmmm. :thinking: I did think it was because they were a Category Moderator, but I’ve just checked your /about page and it doesn’t look like you have any - https://community.smartthings.com/about

Just to check, does this user have full Moderator (or Admin) abilities? You can check from their admin user page in the Permissions section:

There should not be a way for a TL4 to delete a topic without being granted extra moderation permissions.


I can help you add that CSS snippet to a custom theme component, but it may be worth tracking down exactly what’s happening first. :+1:

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