Posted under Bugs & Features
I'm sure you've already noticed, but the opening posts of topic #1972, topic #1996, and topic #1876 have been blanked out by their thread creator, user #106573. I'm guessing this is a feature of account deletions, and it's detrimental to the site, having whole threads and responses gone because of it. A user's forum posts should be left alone even when their account is deleted.
It's just that he felt really bad at how he used to be, and manually editted the posts before deleting - normally the posts are not touched
(proof, in this locked thread he couldn't delete posts)
topic #1886
i think this is not a feature, as far as i remember. the user just edited his post or specifically replaced them with 'edit' - one can't post an empty post. after feeling satisfied, he just deleted his account. other posts remain though.
but yeah, it will be annoying to see old posts bumping up. imagine if a user has 1000+ posts and started doing the same.
moral lesson, people should learn to use 'quote'?
Hillside_Moose said:
So it's not automatic, that's good. Is there a way to revert the edits though? Again, it's not something to be encouraged.
History is not recorded for forum posts (nor comments). It can't be reverted (sans Albert breaking out a database backup or something). These threads weren't recorded on web.archive.org either so that wouldn't work.
Is it possible to create a setting like, "thread opening messages cannot be edited by anyone except moderators (and above) after a 48-hour time limit has been reached"? I believe I have seen something like that on other forums.
That would suck if one just wanted to correct a typing or grammar error well afterwards; yet the harm would be minimal compared to a formerly active member wiping out all of his or her openings.
You would have to have some kind of brain deficiency if a 48-hour time limit makes your life more difficult. And no, deleting the threads wasn't the correct course of action; even if the aliases were dumb, the responses within the threads weren't. We archive forum threads so we don't have to repeat the same damn argument every time someone suggests the same damn alias/implication.
There have been cases where someone edited their OP more than 48 hours after it was originally posted for a good reason. For example, updating a thread when something changes so that it is up-to-date on a particular subject (would be dumb to make a whole new thread every time). I see no reason to make legitimate use cases impossible only to prevent the rare case of people editing away their posts.
Furthermore, limiting this "post cannot be edited after 48 hours" feature to opening posts wouldn't actually fully solve the problem in those rare cases, since people would still be able to nuke their non-opening posts if they wanted to.
Has this ever even happened before besides this one user? Doesn't seem worth implementing a whole new feature because of a single dumb user deleting three posts.
Hillside_Moose said:
And no, deleting the threads wasn't the correct course of action; even if the aliases were dumb, the responses within the threads weren't. We archive forum threads so we don't have to repeat the same damn argument every time someone suggests the same damn alias/implication.
I do agree that deleting the threads didn't help anything. Should be undeleted IMO.
Happened again in topic #10331.
