I wrote a post in error, not realizing who was being talked about. I tried to delete it, and got an error I had been “doing that too much.” At most I’ve deleted one other post in the past month. I was told to wait 30 seconds, so I assumed I had accidentally clicked it twice. But I hadnt–as the post was still there upon refresh. I waited the allotted time and tried again, and it appeared to delete. But, upon refresh, the comment was still there. And when I tried to delete it one more time, I was told that I had to wait 10 hours to try again.
Not only does it seem to be glitchy, but such protection seems unnecessary since we have the five minute edit rule here. So it would make more sense if deletion were also confined to those five minutes.
I did just barely have enough time to manually delete my post from my phone (where deleting multiple paragraphs takes a while due to how much more difficult it is to select all text), but I very much might not have—i just happened to come back and see if my post was deleted, after reading a whole other thread, so I would have been outside the time window.
Deleting can be a rather useful tool on mobile since it takes so much ch longer to delete lots of text, but what I experienced makes that not very useful.
(This was meant to be a single post, but it’s also oddly easy to accidentally submit a post on mobile. I’m not entirely sure why, bit ocasionally I’m in the middle of writing the post, and the keyboard goes away, so I wind up hitting the ever moving reply button.)
For the second, it told me I must wait 14 seconds before trying again, and for the third 23 hours. That’s a steep escalation! How is it supposed to work?
If you put on your “pretend some of your users are evil” hat…*
A user could come in, contribute a bunch of interesting conversations, then ragequit and decide to delete all their content as a punishment to the community. Hence deletions are rate limited, just like every other user action.
Think about what this would mean for the first post in a topic, as well.
* This is kiiiiinda important if you are, gonna, say, found Facebook.
It’s done so that deleting a post doesn’t make it where the mods can’t see it. A poster exploited that, deleting a post that was very bad to avoid moderation, as the mods took longer than 24 hours to see it.
Since the mods see no reason that they should ever not have access to posting history of a post, even if it is deleted, they chose a really long time to keep it around. Being able to see that the post was deleted makes it easy for them to kniw it’s there and check the edit history. (Plus the fact that you can’t hide that you deleted something discourages deletions and encourages making sure your post was good the first time. Hence why most forum software leaves a trace.)
Edits here are restricted to only occurring five minutes after a post. There’s no reason for deletions to be restricted in any way other than that. No one should be able to delete a post that is older than those same five minutes.
The issue seems to be that Discourse treat edits and deletions as different things, when a deletion is just a special type of edit.
Sure, the 5 minute window is specific to this board. But it seems to make a lot more sense that deletions and edits should be restricted based on the age of the post, and not by how often the user deletes or edits things.
There’s definitely a bug here. Yesterday it showed me my posts as deleted, and today most of them are back.
For Dope purposes it would make more sense to restrict deletion to 5 minutes after posting, and get rid of the limits on how often you can do it. Is that possible in the settings, @codinghorror?
Also, is undeleting supposed to be blocked? If so, I do think they could have chosen a more sensible way to disable it, the message is really confusing.
