why there arent any delete button ?

Mark

@Roguefoxx: The short answer is no. You can remove comments and discussions without "breaking" anything. Whether people in this discussion have done it properly or not is up in the air - I haven't looked at anyone's code but my own.

The only time when it is dangerous to delete things is if you delete a user - then all of that user's comments and discussions get messed up. This will be the case with any forum.

Minisweeper

I fail to see how a properly designed system would allow users to be deleted without breaking stuff. It's a basic programming practice that things (users, discussions, comments) should be referred to by ID's rather than names - when you're dragging comments out the table it should check for the posters id in the users table and get the information it needs from there, not add the user's information to the comments table. Thus if you delete a users record completely from the users table, whenever it tries to search for their id to get the information to display next to a post it would fail and stuff would 'break'. To solve that problem you then either need to leave some stuff in the users table (which means you're not really deleting it) or add the username (at *least*) to the places where it's required in reference which means you have unnecessary information lieing round the place. Alternatively, delete their comments and discussions and EVERYTHING else aswell - now, call me old fashioned, but i dont like that idea on a discussion forum.

As for deleting stuff other than users - Mark for one certainly has his reasons why he'd never want to allow that on a forum of his design.

NickE

I don't think there's any danger of that Comment Removal extension actually breaking your database. I've tested it extensively, and there are several (redundant) conditions and limitations which should ensure nothing more than what you specified is deleted. If, for some bizarre reason something does go wrong, nothing more than one discussion and/or a few comments should be affected (either stray comments with no discussion and thus no way to view them, or an orphaned discussion which dosn't contain any comments).

@Mini, what you could do is create a user account that's labelled 'deleted' or something (maybe even with it's own role), then set all the deleted user's comments/discussions to that account id, so every comment of the deleted user would show up as created by 'deleted'. That sounds like a good extension...

Dinoboff

And the cleanup extension didn't break anything.

Minisweeper

The cleanup extension doesnt delete users who have posted anything. That's not a bad idea though sir.

Dinoboff

I was talking about the feature that delete hiden comment and discussion.

I am totally agree with mark and you about (even if it is frustating to look for the deleting button when you start using vanilla}.

ps: some might want a feature to delete all the post of a user.

mary

"some might want a feature to delete all the post of a user." Like spammers, for instance. I don't see the big deal, it is a *setting* with other forums, why can it not be so here?

Wanderer

I love Vanilla, it certainly does the job simply, elegantly, reliably and the ease-of-use for novice users can't be beaten.

However, it really is a pain to have to go into the database to delete comments.

Unfortunately the Comment Removal extension does not work with my version of MySQL.

Somehow, from a moderator's point of view, Vanilla does not seem complete without the basic and essential function of deleting comments and users. Hide just does not do it for me.

imathis

What host are you using? That's pretty lame.

Wanderer

I'm using GlobalServe (Australia).

They tell me an upgrade is in the works in the "near future"

imathis

yeah I got that stuff from ipowerweb back when I used to host with them... They still don't have php5. Dreamhost is who I use now, they use pretty current mysql and once for a web app that needed special services, I compiled a custom installation of php. Man, I get annoyed at inferior hosts, I feel for ya.