Unable to delete comments on forum

Petersl

Hi everyone,

When trying to delete a comment I get a permissions error, does anyone else get this error?

Alexandru_BD

Hello @Petersl,

I've replied to you privately as well, but I'll post my response here as well.

Out of the box, community members (aside from those with the all encompassing category level permissions) can’t delete their discussions (or questions, or ideas, or polls, basically the first post in any thread, or comments or answers, basically replies). But users can edit their comments/replies of course, and I have extended the timeframe when editing is possible from 4 hours to 1 day, for convenience.

By default, only Admins and Moderators have permission to delete posts and comments. There's a logic behind this approach. The reason for this is the following scenario: if I’m a user who posted an interesting discussion, that then received plenty of thoughtful replies, and If I then come in and delete that discussion, all those comments will go with it, which is not usually fair to the commenters and the rest of the community..

You may always get in touch with me, or one of the mods, should you wish to delete or amend a discussion.
And yes, when it comes to deleting comments and replies on a thread, we currently have two options, one is the tombstone, which is helpful because it doesn't break the discussion flow, so the comment window is still shown afterwards, or delete in full, which basically removes the comment/reply entirely.

Another way to do this would be to provide a delete option using the 'Reporting' addon (e.g., "Please delete this post") to allow users to request that their post be deleted by the community management team. This means that such requests will end up in a queue (next to the other moderation queues we have, for example 'spam'). This would help us to assess whether the post has many comments, and if so whether it's preferable to edit (or blank) the post and change the author rather than delete the post outright. But we don't get deletion requests that often, and we are usually proactive when it comes to deleting posts/comments which are inappropriate, or out of place.😉

We'll see what the best approach is, but like I said, feel free to get in touch whenever you have questions or wish to delete your threads/comments.

Thank you once again for being here with us, and for your feedback! 👍️🤝

Regards