If a user deletes their post it is shown as “deleted by user”.
The problem that I see is that all forum members can view the full edit history of the post and can read everything even if it has already been deleted.
Only when “delete removed posts after” time (default 1 day) expires the posts gets completely removed and is only visible for admins any more.
But neither is what I want. I want to keep an entry that says “this post was delete by user”. For transparancy reasons it should be visible to everyone that some post was there before and has been deleted. But for data protection (and possibly legal) reasons what was actually there should not be readable by non admin users any more.
This very reasonable behavior doesn’t seem to be possible today. Can this be added?
Or did I miss a setting? Thanks in advance!
A related probelm that aggravates and exacerbates the above issue is that the deleted post history that all users can read is shown only partially, which could lead to misunderstandings.
In this screenshot of a deleted post in the default HTML side by side comparison, and the HTML view only the picture is visible:
However only if I go to source code view I see that the deleted post besides the picture also contained the phrase “Ich mache nur Spaß bitte nicht falsch verstehen” = “I am only joking, please don’t take this the wrong way”
I’m not aware of any auto-function/setting that does this, but you could add ‘(post deleted by author)’ to your flagged Watched Words, and then you could manually hide the edit revisions when the ‘deleted’ post pops up in the Review queue. And a post won’t auto-disappear if it has a flag on it, so that should keep it in the topic too.
You may need to explain this behaviour, and maybe edit Discobot, etc to reflect the new policy.
Limitations:
It casts an inappropriate flag, which isn’t strictly accurate.
Normally users get 24h to change their mind about deletions, whereas this would occur soon after them hitting the dustbin icon
Would also scoop up anyone who typed (post deleted by author) in a regular post about post deletions
Thanks for the advice how I could emulate something like that with a flagged watched word hack.
A new setting like “hide content/history of deleted posts” yes/no would really be the ideal solution for me.
Any idea about the other issue? The post history does not show the last sentence in HTML view and there is not hint that this is not the full message (like no hint to expand, no dots or anything, just the last sentence omitted) potentially causing confusion.
I haven’t come across this before (though I’m no expert ). Is it possible the “Ich mache nur Spaß bitte nicht falsch verstehen” was added to the message as a ninja edit and didn’t make it into the official edit record?
Edit: I tried it with this post, but the ninja edit made it into the edit record. I was maybe a bit quick with adding it, so timing could still play a part, but I’m not sure.
Sorry I couldn’t be more help. Hopefully someone else has more answers.
I don’t think so, since it is visible in the source code view. See obove screenshot. Maybe it’s a bug?
Even if you don’t have the exact answers I still appreciate your replies and the effort that you put into helping me. Thank you! I am also trying to sort this out for other users, I would be happy if I could get this “hide content of deleted posts” feature sorted out for all discourse users.
). Is it possible the “Ich mache nur Spaß bitte nicht falsch verstehen” was added to the message as a ninja edit and didn’t make it into the official edit record?