No delete forever option after soft delete for normal users

NoIdeaWhatThatIs

Set the permission for normal users via admin to always , but yet a normal user never gets the "X delete forever option".

Anything i've might missed?

TYIA

clarkwinkelmann

NoIdeaWhatThatIs Flarum doesn't allow regular users to permanently delete anything.

"Allow deleting own posts" permission (technically it's a setting) controls when a user can soft-delete (hide) their content.

"Delete posts forever" permission controls who can perma-delete any post. This is meant for moderators only, if you give this permission to regular users they will be able to delete the content of other users as well.

For more options you would need a custom extension.

NoIdeaWhatThatIs

clarkwinkelmann

We're already able since the last century to delete our own posts from forums and even guestbooks, this is the first time i hear such a thing, are you serious ?😃

clarkwinkelmann

NoIdeaWhatThatIs that's how it works in Flarum. The beauty is that it can be changed and augmented by extensions.

Personally I would recommend to implement this as a background process. Only let users soft delete (maybe change it so users can no longer see their soft deleted content), and only permanently delete the content after a given amount of time in the background through a scheduled task. This way you still have a protection against accidental deletion without the content persisting forever.

When implementing permanent deletion, the extensions must also be taken into account. For example what should happen to files attachments in a post? Extensions might have their own soft deletion logic. Permanently deleting posts can rupture links between content tied to those posts, some extensions might work better with soft deleted post as this preserves the "thread of ownership" of the content linked to those posts through database foreign keys.

For forums without an audit log, preserving the content as soft-deleted also leaves a trace of what happened. This particular use case has solutions though as there are audit log extensions for Flarum, my extension will keep the log even if the content it refers to has been deleted (and log who deleted it).

NoIdeaWhatThatIs

clarkwinkelmann Ah ok so you've developed already a few plugins for flarum if i understood that correctly, so my question would be now how complex would it be to create a plugin to have a delete function like in all other forums too? So like own deleted posts are deleted without further notice (as we're normally used it to be) and deleted (own) coments or quotes have placeholder texts like "deleted by XY"

TYIA for your upcoming reply 🙂

clarkwinkelmann

NoIdeaWhatThatIs I don't have any availability for custom development at the moment so I cannot really answer as to the complexity.

I'm not familiar with how other forums do it, as I mostly use Flarum-based forums these days.

If you want a placeholder where a message has been deleted, it seems like the easiest would be to simply edit a post and write "deleted" in the post body.

NoIdeaWhatThatIs

clarkwinkelmann

clarkwinkelmann If you want a placeholder where a message has been deleted, it seems like the easiest would be to simply edit a post and write "deleted" in the post body.

:´D

luceos

I think it's certainly possible to build an extension that allows users to delete their own posts and replace these with a "deleted" placeholder. Flarum uses Event Posts for these.

And yeah, I also think it's a bit silly for a user to replace their own text as a surrogate of such a feature, but it is also how we have seen people do these kind of things in many other forum software.