How about a Delete button?

[Baal]

If you stuff up a post like I have done before and want to remove it... you can't.
Is there anyway to enable the ability to delete posts that you have created?

I looked in the edit menus and couldn't see anything that said "remove" or "delete" or "clear"
I just want to delete my own posts, of course Moderators can remove anything they want.

Laters,
Baal.

[Elric of Grans]

Hail Baal,

Even I cannot delete a post ;) Seems to be some oddity in the forum software - perhaps it's a bug in the threaded hack or something? All I know is I can only nuke threads, not posts.

[Griselda]

Elric, you can delete individual posts if you switch to linear mode temporarily!

Baal, the reason we don't let users delete their own posts is that it does terrible things to the thread tree. I can't remember off the top of my head whether deleting a post from a thread deletes all the replies to that post (bad, because you'd have the power to erase others' posts), or whether it leaves all replies as "orphaned" posts (bad, because this can make it look like people are replying to somebody else). For that reason, the only time we will agree to delete an individual post is if there are no replies to it. Otherwise, the next best thing is to edit out the contents of that post.

-Griselda

[Kevin]

Deleting a post that has children will not delete the children, but it will orphan them. They will only be viewable in linear view, and they will not display at all in the threaded list becuase when that list is generated the deleted parent won't be found so it will never look for the children.

I haven't played with it a lot, but I *think* you can manually rechain the orphans to another parent, or maybe that was just a function that was commented out because it wasn't completed.... Either way simply editing the post and putting in "post deleted" is a lot quicker and simpler.

The delete button can be put back in the threaded view for those who have rights to use it, but with the orphaning issue, there isn't a lot of point. Trying to re-attach the orphans doesn't make a lot of sense either since they would be connected to the wrong parent so having delete do that automatically still messes things up, which leaves you attaching them to a deleted reply which puts us right back at using edit to do that. :)

I really need to get my arse back in gear on hacking the thread hack to work better, but the job search is taking up a lot of my time. :)

[kandrathe]

It would be a little trickier programming, but it would be nice to be able to delete a post if it had no children. Most often the post I want to delete is an accidental duplicate.

[Baal]

*chuckles*

Gee thanks :P

But anyway.... thanks for clearing it up a little, I usually prefer the Flat look over the Threaded but I do understand about what would happen if you tried to remove a post that had replies.

Thanks all,
Baal.

[Archon_Wing]

Why does it now seem so cruel to nuke a post now? Think of the children! :D