To answer the OP.
You only soft delete in Discourse hard delete is reserved for delete spammers when you nuke the entire user.
Approaches you can take when dealing with deleted content:
-
There is the log in admin user logs to
/admin/logs/staff_action_logs
to see all deleted topics -
You can use
/?status=deleted
to find deleted topics as staff -
You can move stuff into a quarantine category that end users have no access to.