In a Discourse forum support thread titled ‘Users soft deleting comments?! Bug, misconfiguration or should I create a feature request?’, user _thiago raises concerns that when users delete their own posts, the content remains visible to others — posing security risks, as demonstrated by real-world incidents involving leaked private data. While moderators can see revisions, the public can too, which _thiago wants to change: he seeks a configuration where deleted posts (and their edit history) are hidden from the public but remain visible to moderators, while non-deleted posts retain public edit histories. Moin suggests setting delete removed posts after to 0, which hides deleted posts immediately from non-moderators — though merefield questions whether this hides content from staff too. Moin clarifies that moderators can still view hidden replies. bloomexperiment confirms this solution works as intended. _thiago acknowledges the gap between desired behavior and current functionality, and considers whether this is a bug or missing feature, referencing guides for feature requests and bug reports. He plans to test the suggested setting and report back. merefield encourages confirmation with a practical example.
I would like to know if this is a miss configuration or if I should request a feature. Right now, when a user is using a discourse forum, and they delete their message, other users can still access what was deleted.
I’ve seen this cause all sorts of issues. It would be great if moderators could still see what was deleted, but not everyone else!
I’ll give you guys two real world examples where I’ve seen this cause an issue: A non-moderator employee accidentally shares non public information, quickly deleted his comment, but it still took a few minutes for the moderators to catch on and effectively delete the comment. Another example was when a community user accidentally leaked a private software key and the same events followed. Both instances took over 10 minutes for the moderation team to catch on and by the time they did, the damage had already been done!
So, is this a miss configuration or is this something that I’d have to make a feature request/bug report?
ah, but hang on, those are two different things. Is there a way to make deleted comments not visible anymore while leaving the history visible to the public?
I don’t want to take away the history of editions of a comment, but I also don’t want to leave a deleted comment public
The history of editions of a non deleted comment should be public
A deleted comment (and its history of editions) should only be visible to moderators
From what I understand, there isn’t a way to do this. Is there a way to request a feature or to report a bug? I can’t tell if it is a bug or a missing feature.
