Abraham, are you here?

[Abraham Chaffin]

Hello Jeremy.

Abraham

[Jeremy Garchow]

Hi.

I’m going to delete the last few posts, but keep the original.

Note that you will be able to respond to this post, but you won’t see it on the cow, and your response will be deleted as well. Anyone that was subscribed to the thread can respond and get response emails, but the posts themselves are in the ether.

You can see them, however, if you choose to sort the forum by newest posts.

It’s seems a little odd.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

And poof. There are all gone.

This post will show up on the cow.

[Jeremy Garchow]

But this post won’t show up.

[Abraham Chaffin]

Hello Jeremy,

Yes, I am aware of this. Orphaned posts are disconnected from the main thread, this is one of the down sides to allowing users to delete their own posts. The logic is, responses to posts which have been deleted are orphaned because the lineage of responses are no longer connected to the original post and become out of context. However, these individual children posts are still able to be accessed directly, as they may still be pertinent by themselves. Allowing users to delete their own posts, and deactivating posts within threads creates this problem.

I see two possible changes which may help with the confusion, but have negative aspects as well:
1) Automatically deactivate all child posts off of a post which has been deleted or deactivated. This cleans up the issue with orphan posts still showing up in certain views, but may remove helpful content.
2) Remap all orphaned posts onto the ancestor thread. This keeps all posts in the thread even after being orphaned, but the conversation then may be confusing, as posts have been removed from the middle.

The mechanism which currently exists, and has existed for many years, is in place because of the drawbacks above.

Abraham

[Jeremy Garchow]

I think that if a post is deleted, it should keep the thread as is, but that post simply says “deleted” by “deleted”.

This keeps the structure in place, does not delete child posts, and I think people will be smart enough to figure out what happened as there’s a but of a “paper trail”.

Does that make sense?

[Abraham Chaffin]

Thank you for the suggestion Jeremy. You should begin seeing the “Post removed” message around the site now. Hopefully that will solve the issue.

Abraham

[Jeremy Garchow]

Love it!

Thanks!