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Deleting Posts in v1
In the previous versions, you could "clean" the posts if they are hidden. Is there a way to do this in v1?
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WEll the long answer is nope
and the short answer is no
99.9% of the time the answer in Vanilla is a resounding YES.
Yes, you can remove hidden discussions. Yes, the extension exists. The removing of hidden discussions actually works perfectly on my dev server. I'm having trouble with the other half of the extension - which performs a mysqldump of your database. When it is finished I will be uploading it to the addons site.
I'm pretty sure that someone is going to write a different extensions sometime soon that will allow you to delete instead of hide instantly.
As for the logic behind not being able to actually delete comments and discussions, there is PLENTY.
1. I don't care how small your webspace or allotted database space is, comments and discussions take up almost no room. I've had this forum running for years and it has hundreds of thousands of comments in it. It is still less than 13 megs dumped to plain text.
2. Data is valuable. A good rule of thumb when considering whether you should delete something or not is to NOT do it. You never know when you might need that data again.
3. Mythology: Some people think that having that data laying around slows things down. That is not true. It does not affect performance in the least.
4. It's all semantics. I could have called the button "delete" instead of "hide" and no-one here would be the wiser. But people like to keep things "tidy" in their heads, so if something is hidden, that's not enough. They need to know it's "gone".
Let me tell a story: Years ago I ran a private forum where two members started a flamewar between one another. I had a "delete" button that actually just marked comments and discussions as deleted, and I'd spend a lot of time going around cleaning up after them. A few weeks after it began one of the members stopped coming to the forum. He later contacted me via email and told me that he had been attacked by the member still attending the forum in real life at a club in Chicago. He was in the process of filing a lawsuit against the guy and the courts were demanding backup documentation on what led up to the event. He needed to have records of the threats online, and ... luckily ... I still had them.
I can think of countless times when having that "bad" data turned out to be a good thing. You might not like having it in there. It might eat away at the back of your mind when you're trying to sleep at night. But you will thank me later when you need it for *whatever* reason.
When I was at senior school in 2000, I started a school forum and hundreds of my schoolmates pumped into it. Hundreds of posts (comments) were created every day since then. The forum grew to about 1,000,000 posts and 100,000 topics in these 6 years. However, not even a bit of posts were permanently removed except spams. In fact, only 0.1% of the posts were `removed' from the forum and most of them were just moved to a Recycle Bin and never seen by common users. On one hand, it is clear that hidden comments would not affect DB size or performance, for those `removed' posts did not affect a bit of mine. On the other hand, when participants were involved in quarrels or even fights, they would need evidence and they would beat you like a pig head if you do not have backups of their comments.
Mark, is that possible as an extension, if not in the core? Same idea for hidden discussions, too.
Immersion > It works!