More Fine Grain Control over "Delete" Permissions

[USCJ Digital]

I believe we want our users to be able to edit and even delete their own content.

My concern is this:

User "Alpha" starts a topic in one of our forums. Over time, 10s or 100s of replies accumulate from individuals interested and invested in the topic.

For whatever reason, one day in the future, user "Alpha" decides to delete the entire thread that they started.

I want user "Alpha" to be able to delete/edit singular posts, but not an entire topic - that may have been going on for years - just because they had a bad day, or whatever 😏

Could there be a way to set permissions for members to delete their posts, but not an entire topic? In other words, a bit more fine grain control over delete permissions.

[Lindy]

Have you considered leveraging the edit timeout for this purpose (minimizing damaging due to rage-quitting?) We can certainly see what kind of traction this feedback gets over time, but from my experience, it's equally - if not more - confusing and damaging to have a member run through and edit/delete individual posts, which often disrupts the flow and context of the conversation. 

[USCJ Digital]

Lindy,

Yes, I am considering it in fact. The challenge is -- our community is for the leadership of congregations (lay and professional) across North America. We want to assume a certain level of "trust" in our case - that is someone wants to edit something 24 hours later to make an addendum, correct spelling, whatever, that they can do that (as they can do on say, Facebook).

On the other hand, to your point, I don't want someone to delete an entire thread, just "because."

I think we are going to have to monitor this and fine tune based on user behavior and feedback (or pushback).

So - if someone wants to delete a single post in the middle of a thread, I'm ok with that at least for now. But, as stated, I would not want someone who started a thread to delete the thread altogether. So, I think being able to delete a single post - even the first post in a thread that one started - is different in a community such as ours than being able to delete an entire thread.

Another idea ... what if only admins/moderators can ever delete a first post in a thread, but users could subsequently delete single posts?

[steve00]

Wouldn't deleting first post throw all the other posts out as  no one would know what they were replying to so could be very confusing reading posts to a topic where the first post has been deleted (unless misreading your idea) ?

[USCJ Digital]

@steve00 ... Yes, you have the right idea, and yes, that would potentially be very confusing!

I tried to amend my request to that the original poster could *not* delete their first post if they are the creator of the topic, but could delete subsequent posts.

For example, I start on post on "how to post on this forum."

A week later, I reply to another users post.

A day later, I don't like my reply - I want to delete that reply.

A month later, I don't like the entire thread and who cares that 120 people have added to the topic. I go to delete the first post (thereby deleting the entire thread), I can *not* do that.

That's my request 🙂

Does that make a little more sense?

[steve00]

So ... you want to delete an entire thread regardless of other peoples replies ?

What if in the future someone who posted in that thread wants to reference in another topic something they added in original thread that was deleted (as you sometimes see here at ips or other sites)

Hope that makes sense ?

[USCJ Digital]

No, that is exactly what I do not want to do.

No user should be able to delete the first post in a thread, ever (thereby deleting the entire thread). But users can delete individual, subsequent posts that they created in the thread. Does that make sense in terms of what I am saying?

[opentype]

So I comment to add to the “traction”. 😉 I agree that first post and subsequent posts should have an option for different permissions. 

In my case: I have font identification forums, where people make a request and once it is solved, they often want the entire topic to disappear, and by that, hiding/deleting other peoples posts and making it impossible that the topic can be found later on by other people with the same question. So there is a big difference here. Hiding/deleting individual posts might cause a little bit of confusion here and there, but it is something very different from hiding other people’s replies and removing an entire discussion. 

[Jed Rosenzweig]

I've had this convo with IPS before @USCJ Digital. It's really frustrating that you can't give people the ability to self-delete without destroying topics (or do a post wipe in admin, same result). It's not going to be fixed soon because there's no distinction between "first post" and "the topic" as far as the admin/backend goes. To achieve what you are describing  they will need to decouple first post from the canonical topic data. 

Which they should definitely do but I'd imagine it's something they'd need to tackle in a 5.0 rewrite, not a 4.x release.