Editing/deleting posts

Hi,
I was just writing an answer to a question in the support section. While writing I noticed a blue dot showing up for a short period of time and when I tried sending the answer the whole topic and the user look like to have disappeared.

My question is, is it possible to edit and delete posts at any time (for example, even months after creating them)?

Editing: I got confused with posts from the mailing list. I noticed it immediately after logging out. Sorry!
I didn’t try editing an old post (for some reasons) but maybe @deeplow knows.

Hi @Raphael_Balthazar

It may be possible that someone deleted their post or their user. Can you specify exactly where the blue dot showed up?

Bellow I describe some more information on the current policies (enforced by our discourse settings). They may provide some more context to your situation.

Post deletion policy

(as of 21st Nov 2020)

Users can remove their posts and the effects will be immediate. This is not the default discourse behavior (the default is leaving it up 24 and only after deleted), but the moderators believed there to be legitimate concern of users to have their content immediately purged from the public and also to avoid some user confusion with the deletion not taking immediate effect.

A user can edit their posts up to 24 hours

New users can edit their posts up to 24 hours after publishing. There are exceptions, though for higher trust level users. See this post for more information:

Deletion of profiles

I believe a user can delete their profile immediately but I haven’t explore what are the effects in terms of posts. If they get deleted as well or just removed the username.

2 Likes

I probably wasn’t clear enough but it was my fault. I simply got confused with the muted mailing list and posts being displayed or hidden. I read a post from “qubes-users” here in the forum and wanted to write an answer. I logged in and began writing and after a while the original post vanished.

Only after logging out did I notice that this had to do with “qubes-users” and “muted categories”.

I think it was where the “last edited on” symbol is but I guess it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, thanks for clarifying the forum policy regarding editing and deleting posts. :slight_smile:

I still don’t understand. How/why did the post disappear? Are you saying it disappeared for you because you muted the category? (Did you actually mute the category while you were replying, though? It doesn’t sound like you did.)

I did not mute anything and I did not change anything in preferences either.
I was reading the posts and I didn’t pay attention to the additional information [qubes-users] making it clear that this is a post from the mailing list.

This morning there were 3 posts displayed by user Guerlan from the mailing list and these posts were still displayed after I had logged in to the forum.
Maybe I pushed the “go back one page” in Firefox because of the blue dot that appeared while I was writing my answer but I am not 100% sure. This might be a logical explanation. At least I did that (or refresh) in the past when new answers were posted during writing a comment.

I guess I would have noticed that I wouldn’t have been able to answer anyway (because of the muted category).

Sorry, that I didn’t exactly remember. I was a little confused until I understood the connection to the mailing list.

I still don’t understand how/why a post disappeared, but it’s fine. :slightly_smiling_face:

@Raphael_Balthazar I tried to make the title more specific but I’m not sure I got it fully right. So let me know (or change it) if it’s not appropriate. This will help others find the issue if they have the same one.

I think it may be an edge case of the login flow which is:

  • hard to reproduce
  • very low change of happening

So I think we’ll be fine if we don’t investigate it too much and I think since it’s not solved, it should be ok. If we do get similar feedback, it may be worth taking a deeper look.