Deletion policy

[deeplow]

@adw

At the very least, one person should not be able to delete another person’s post, which means that someone who starts a thread should not have the power to delete everyone else’s replies to it by deleting the entire thread.

@unman

Whole threads should not be removed at the whim of a user - there may
(as has been said) be excellent material for other users.
The only grounds that messages should be removed by admins should be
privacy exposure, or where the message runs completely outwith our code of
conduct.

Yes I agree with not being able to delete other’s responses. And as I understand it, it is currently not possible for a user to delete a thread unless a moderator intervenes.

As far as moderation intervention policy goes for topic deletion, I think it should be on a case-by-case basis balancing the following:

• code of conduct
• user embarrassment / privacy exposure / simple typos
• number / effort in replies
• potential usefulness of discussion (and learning from mistakes)

And keeping in mind, the users may be fine with “anonymisation” of a post (i.e. remove user-related information from the post and change the poster to “DeletedUser”, for example).