Transparent post deletion

[david (David Taylor)]

(Edit: note that this was written before I joined the team, it should not be read as ‘official’ )

I’d support this feature. It can be very confusing for users to find their posts deleted and really doesn’t help the user/staff relationship. I would consider this as solving a similar problem to the curated topic summary proposal.

I included a brief description of what I imagine this looking like in one of my GSOC proposals:

While there is already an automated ‘summary’ feature, there are still frequent times where there is a need for admins/mods to remove posts from a topic to make it more readable (e.g. plugin threads on Meta). While this is possible by just deleting the posts, for some communities deleting the history of a thread is not desirable.

Each of the components for this plugin already exist. Filtering of the post stream is already done by the automatic ‘summary’ feature, and I created a PR last month which adds plugin hooks to filter the post stream. There could be additional functionality added such that posts in the stream can be hidden with different ‘reasons’ (e.g. ‘flagged’, ‘awaiting deletion’, ‘hidden from summary’ etc.)

At its simplest level, this could be a single button alongside the ‘delete’ button for each post accessible to staff. Clicking the button would hide the post from the topic view for all users, until the user clicks “show all posts”. This would also be available as a bulk action from the moderator wrench.