Topic deletion

[danb00]

Will phpBB 3.0 support as they say Soft Deletion?
Something like what Vbulletin does. By this i mean the topic is "deleted". So the user can't see the topic as it appears to them its been deleted but to a admin its visable

Two options
'Soft' delete - Leave "Deleted" Message
Physically remove will Delete the message

Demo of soft delete see pic (due to an error in the phpBB version thumb nails appear to not be working. Click the dead image to see it)
Bug report http://www.phpbb.com/bugs/viewreport.php?b=2102" target="_blank

[Acyd Burn]

This is not planned for 3.0.x, but is on the list for 3.2.x

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Good. That's one feature that can make moderation a whole lot easier.

[bigmouth]

the requested functionality can be very easily achieved with phpbb 2 and 3.
basically, you create a "deleted/trashcan/recycle bin" forum, make this forum visible only to admins, and you "soft delete" a message, a thread, or part of a thread by moving the posts you want to delete to this "recycle bin" forum.

if you delete individual post/s out of a thread, and later you wish to undelete, you use the built-in join threads functionality. if i understand correctly, the undeleted posts will fit right in place.
for phpbb 2, where there is no "join", you can either install the "join threads" mod, or just live with imperfect undelete: you can undelete threads, but if you undelete individual posts they will appear in new threads.

i think the easiest way to implement this functionality as acyd indicated is planned for 3.2, is just to make the default install come with a "recycle bin" forum with the appropriate permissions out of the box, ie it require only change to the install/schema_data.sql, but not to any source code.

[danb00]

ahh man this i get the feeling is going to take some time.....

[Highway of Life]

the requested functionality can be very easily achieved with phpbb 2 and 3.
basically, you create a "deleted/trashcan/recycle bin" forum, make this forum visible only to admins, and you "soft delete" a message, a thread, or part of a thread by moving the posts you want to delete to this "recycle bin" forum.

This is what I do as well.
Deleted posts are just removed to a new topic in the Staff viewable only forum, and deleted topics can still be renamed with [deleted] and move it while leaving a shadow topic, or moving it altogether... depending on your personal preference.

if you delete individual post/s out of a thread, and later you wish to undelete, you use the built-in join threads functionality. if i understand correctly, the undeleted posts will fit right in place.

Correct, this is the "merge" function, all you need to check is the topic ID.

for phpbb 2, where there is no "join", you can either install the "join threads" mod, or just live with imperfect undelete: you can undelete threads, but if you undelete individual posts they will appear in new threads.

i think the easiest way to implement this functionality as acyd indicated is planned for 3.2, is just to make the default install come with a "recycle bin" forum with the appropriate permissions out of the box, ie it require only change to the install/schema_data.sql, but not to any source code.

It's really pretty easy to set a new role in Olympus that will basically create this, all you need to do is make the forum.

[Eelke]

I personally am using a recycle bin forum as well and it works fine, but I just wanted to point out that it is not completely identical to the functionality as proposed in the first post.

The essential difference is that you loose the information of where the moved thread or posts came from (while with softdelete, it will be implicit to those that have the permissions to see soft-deleted posts/threads). When using a trashcan forum, you will need to either remember in case of a small forum, or actually get some procedure in place so that moderators record this information with their "deletion" on bigger boards. Or simply live with not having the information, of course. The point is, it's not completely equivalent

Admittedly, no shocking stuff, but I think if the core team is going to spend time on this, they should implement a soft-delete that basically flags threads/topics for deletion instead of simply moving stuff to a different forum.

[itsonlybarney]

Would it be possible to do by just adding a column to the post, topic and other relevant tables to indicate whether it has been hidden and then in the display script check whether there is a value in that column and not display depending on the value??

[Highway of Life]

Possibly yes... this might just be either an added permission, or you could combine it with an existing permission.
The functions are already there, all you would have to do is run an extra function that if deleted, it would check for proper viewable permissions.

I'm thinking of making a MOD that will basically do the same thing, but it would allow only the topic author and staff to view the topic.

[Eelke]

Sure, that would be the most obvious way to implement this, I suppose. Only risk is that if you're not careful, someone somewhere might accidentally display "deleted" topics simply because they do not take that flag into account. So maybe from that POV, it's safer to move the deleted topics into a separate table.