[META: FORUM Question] Thread disappeared
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I recently received notification that a thread I had posted to had a response. When I clicked on the link in the notifications (https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/15566/where-to-find-install-the-plugin-manager-for-notepad/6), it tells me Access Denied.
Is it just me, or can no-one see the thread anymore (ie, is it a bug in the forums, or just for me)? Was that thread deleted or locked for admin reasons (abuse, something else)? Or did the OP delete the thread somehow?
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Now that I’ve created this thread, as the creator of these, I can see the “delete topic” in Topic Tools.
It seems to me that probably that option shouldn’t exist except in the cases:
- in the first N minutes (like you cannot edit/delete a post significantly after posting)
- when there are replies in a thread by someone other than the original poster.
I can understand wanting to delete a thread where OP (original poster) asks a question, then quickly figures it out, so OP wants to delete it before anyone bothers reading/answering it.
But once the discussion has started, I think the OP shouldn’t be able to unilaterally decide for the community that the entire conversation is not worth keeping. Maybe the OP realized too late that “oh, I had done something silly”, and wanted to delete it… but there may be useful answers in that thread that would help someone else in the future. Letting the OP unilaterally delete the thread gets rid of the usefulness of that thread as a future reference.
For example, in that thread, I had given a detailed response that gave useful debugging techniques. In future threads, I may want to be able to link back to that post, but with the whole thread deleted, I am no longer able to do that.
Can some admin disable deleting the entire thread after N minutes and/or after someone other than OP has posted in the thread? Or does everyone else think that OP should have the unilateral topic-delete power, and I’m in the wrong here? (Or is that limitation just not possible with the version of NodeBB Forums we use?)
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To answer part of your questions…
Is it just me, or can no-one see the thread anymore (ie, is it a bug in the forums, or just for me)? Was that thread deleted or locked for admin reasons (abuse, something else)? Or did the OP delete the thread somehow?
Yes the topic was deleted…as an admin I can still see it. I’m assuming it was deleted by the OP rather than being deleted by another admin for some other reason.
Though I don’t have the ability or rights to change anything like that on the forum (or know if it is even possible), I do agree with most of what you said.
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Hi, @peterjones,
Like @Dail, as I’m a moderator ( quite a while that I haven’t use that privilege, anyway ! ), I can see that this topic is deleteled, I simply noticed that all text of the
6thpost, of that discussion, created by @westjc, was greyed !So, I thought that restoring it ( available option, while clicking on the
∶symbol ) would, automatically, restore the whole discussion. Unfortunately, it’s not the case :-((But if you want to, I should be able, as a moderator, to copy all contents of the different deleted posts of this discussion, opening a New Topic post, refering to the same subject !
Just tell me about it :-))
Cheers,
guy038
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Thanks for the offer, @guy038 , but it’s probably not worth the effort (I didn’t have any earth-shatteringly helpful ideas in that Topic).
It just rubbed me the wrong way that an OP can unilaterally delete an entire Topic, thereby deleting other people’s posts.
Thinking about it more, I’d probably rather have the Topic Tools > Delete Topic feature disabled completely (for non-admin users), rather than the conditional “if older than T or if other posts than OP”, because it would probably be simpler and thus more likely to be possible. But as @dail said, moderator/admins don’t have the power to configure the forum, so it would probably have to be the owner to do it (if possible at all), and I don’t know whether @donho would spend his time tweaking forum settings anymore.
Again, thanks for the input (and for letting me vent).
