Grant me powers of deletia

[loinburger]

Every now and then I'll double-post, often because the server is busy; I'll receive a message telling me that my reply has not gone through, so I hit "reply" again, only to find that the server has been telling vicious lies and that my previous post has in fact gone through. So, I have to change the new post to say something like "I am an inferior human being who has double posted, please mock my pain."

Every once in a great while I'll hit "create new thread" when I intended to hit "reply," and will make a useless thread. I did this recently on OT.

It would help me, and I imagine that it would help the moderators, if I (and other posters) were given limited powers of deletia. Right now I cannot delete my own posts (or threads), so my clutter remains.

How about allowing us to delete our posts so long as there are no more than three replies that follow it? This would prevent somebody from going back and erasing their embarassing participation in a thread ("I NEVER said that Hitler was an upstanding gentleman; look, I never even posted in that thread!") or playing a practical joke (deleting the first post in a thread with a few hundred replies), while at the same time giving us the ability to eliminate some of the forum clutter that we generate.

[ColdWizard]

nah, moderators love deleting stuff, it shows that they are needed and gives them a sense of purpose

[loinburger]

One question I've always had is: what effect does a deleted post have on the poster's post count? If I have a post deleted, is my post count reduced by 1?

I ask because if we were allowed to delete our own posts/threads, and deleted posts still showed up on our post counts, then I could find a rarely-used forum (Civ-Mac or something) and sit there posting and deleting my posts until I'd spammed myself up to Deity (so I could finally have my celebratory piece of Deity cake of whatever the hell Deity people get).

Coldwizard: I know; Ming might sink into a pit of despair if not provided with enough posts to delete.

[Kassiopeia]

This is a good idea, but of course if the aforementioned (and a very sneaky) way of spamming would become possible, then, well, no...
Maybe the limit of deleting a new accidentally made thread should be down to one - one post by another user, no deletia.

What comes to the usefulness of moderators, I am sure the OT is enough work as it is

[DarkCloud]

Problems of abuse arise, at CGN http://www.civgaming.net we gave the posters the power to delete threads that the ycreated... One poster deleted a thread which was well over 5 pages long and pissed everyone off...

When a poster can delete posts, then they may delete relevant details. In principle I am for this option, but some people will likely abuse it and then say "well I didn't say that" in debates, etc. So lets not allow people to do it, please

[Ming]

Yes... posts that are deleted, or posts that are in deleted threads still count. So giving people the ability to delete posts or threads would be a great thing to hand to people that want to pad their post counts

[loinburger]

I suspected that was the case. Oh well.

[Urban Ranger]

Currently, a user can still change details of his own posts by editing, unless the contents are quoted elsewhere.

However, quotes aren't necessarily accurate. Sometimes spoofing around does happen, but nothing malicious yet.

[DaShi]

You can get very old threads deleted. Just keep bumping them until Ming deletes them and bans you.

[Zealot]

I agree with Ming. If deleted posts do count, then mods shouldn't allow users to spam&delete at will.
But I think that double posts are really annoying! Especially because they don't resize! IIRC, I can double post a 50 lines post, and then edit one of them and write "dp", and the thread still has that huge void post with only two characters in it.

[DanQ]

For primarily security purposes, general access to the deleting post feature will not be implemented.

----------------
Dan; Apolyton CS