ALM
I'm against such feature because it looks like spying on members.
If someone wants to delete his post, he should be free to. Being both an admin and one of the active members, I don't want to see such a "trashcan" every time I open the forum either.
In the worst cases, i.e. account stealing, vandalism, forum hacking or something, the data can be restored from the daily backups.

ALM
While I do agree with you here, it is Serge's forum, and as admin he has rights to do what he pleases with other members and with forum features. Although I do believe that on this forum admins have treated certain members with an overly-generous amount of warnings.

I'm even curious though as to why certain posts that, for all intents and purposes, should have been deleted, were left simply locked? Remember the "10 Reasons Why Dantheman40k is a human and not a troll" post? It was left simply locked, edited out by Marco. I can't understand why it wasn't simply deleted.

ALM
I never said that the mentioned cases have to do with hidden boards. I only said that those situations can be handled without making sections that are visible for certain members only. I won't explain why this still sounds wrong to me. Every forum administrator decides by himself. Have such sections on MT2 if you want to, but don't force me or Marco to do the same. We're mature enough to decide.



GeorgeHarrison
Maybe Marco just didn't want to wipe it completely. He removed all bad stuff from the post - that's the main thing. I would also think twice before deleting the post I disliked.

Dagdamor
It just looks better if you delete it. Who wants locked stuff hanging around wasting space? It looks messy if you wipe the original post and then lock the topic. Why not just obliterate it completely?

GeorgeHarrison
Sure, this can be done if Marco's not against.

Anyway, I wanted to suggest everyone a bit different feature: what about the Archive section? I introduced it on my ISFF several years ago, and it worked quite well there. Just a public section for read-only purposes. All locked threads are being moved there instead of being deleted or "recycled". Of course that section won't be collecting the best sort of threads, but the forum will remain transparent, i.e. no hidden stuff. This also leaves the possibility to restore locked topics.

About deleting postings and using a recycle bin: People can delete postings, and they can edit them. The first one could be captured by such a recycle bin, but not the second (unless SMF is capable of managing versions, like a Wiki). If someone wants to cover his traces, he can do it the smart way as well...

Look, ALM; I was grateful for your suggestion this morning because i'm of course not as well trained on this kind of thing as you are, and that was actually a feature i didn't know of, and i thanked you for it. The fact it's being discussed right now is a good sign, see? You made a suggestion and we didn't turn it down immediately.

But with your last post you're really pushing it *again*. Giving suggestions is ok. but what you're doing now is basically ordering us around on how to run LTS, and in a very ugly way too, i don't like it one bit and it's not the first time that you said the same things and you were replied with the same things. You're an admin yourself, you should know how much this behaviour is grating and unfruitful and you should be the first, if you're responsible, to think better and AVOID it.

BTW, why should you ask us to delete your account? If you dont like it just leave, there's a logoff button up there :\
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about the deleting posts that raised all of this mess:
We're making a mountain out of a stone. I don't think the "deleting own posts" problem is or will be so bad to require this much of a ruckus. It never happened until this morning and we all know why without needing to go and see what was deleted. So imho we could close the discussion here.
The archive idea is a-ok to me anyway.