Topic: Delete button request

Posted under Site Bug Reports & Feature Requests

I believe that with the ability to delete my own forum, it would reduce the load on the server and help making the it faster. After all, you can't unhide a forum so it's practically the same, with the benefit of not storing it on the site (May keep the hide button if necessary)

Donovan DMC

Former Staff

Deleting a single forum post would not reduce any load

And no, hiding is not practically the same as deleting because staff can still see hidden things
A delete button will never be added for normal users because it also removes all history, which makes moderation impossible

Deleting a single forum post would not reduce any load

Maybe not by a lot (even if you count multiple forums) but it's better than not reducing any storage

And no, hiding is not practically the same as deleting because staff can still see hidden things

By practically, I meant for most user (not a staff).

A delete button will never be added for normal users because it also removes all history, which makes moderation impossible

Maybe limiting it to privileged user?

See topic #57012.

The only instance something gets permanently deleted from the site is if it was illegal content.
Everything else is essentially hidden from public view while still being viewable to the admins.

Giving a user the option to delete their posts at will, such as their uploads or comments, is not a good idea and would be easily exploited by bad actors.
It would disrupt the site more than if we had simply left it alone and hidden from view.

For example, someone spamming rule-breaking comments across the site and then quickly deleting it before the mods can get to it, essentially scrubbing all evidence while maximising damage.
Alternatively, people could delete all of their forum posts, including any ongoing discussions just because they are the OP, and essentially troll everybody since they will now have the start anew.
IIRC, I believe someone even got into trouble doing just that, but hiding every forum topic they made instead. A mod had to undo all of the hidden posts.

Updated

Donovan DMC

Former Staff

whatismyname1234 said:
Maybe not by a lot (even if you count multiple forums) but it's better than not reducing any storage

We are talking kilobytes at most, this site has more data in images and videos uploaded every minute
This isn't even a blip on the radar, it's a margin of error

whatismyname1234 said:
Maybe limiting it to privileged user?

Even Moderators can't delete forum posts, I don't see why privileged users would be trusted with that

Also consider that there are less than 200 total privileged users, and that they are still moderated just like every other user

I'd be interested to find out how much space a forum post actually occupies, relative to the amount of text in it. My bet would be that 1000 long (4000+ characters per post) forum posts fit inside <= 500k of disk space.

(for comparison, I took a median sample from a month of images and it turns out to be ~1150k)

Updated

Donovan DMC

Former Staff

savageorange said:
I'd be interested to find out how much space a forum post actually occupies, relative to the amount of text in it. My bet would be that 1000 long (4000+ characters per post) forum posts fit inside <= 500k of disk space.

(for comparison, I took a median sample from a month of images and it turns out to be ~1150k)

You'd have to get into postgres documentation for specifics, but just looking at the table structure should get you close enough

https://github.com/e621ng/e621ng/blob/c4e8bbd7e3b5eb1cd11723f9a2e432325d7dc637/db/structure.sql#L790-L802

thegreatwolfgang said:
IIRC, I believe someone even got into trouble doing just that, but hiding every forum topic they made instead. A mod had to undo all of the hidden posts.

On the completely differnt note, I don't know how to view my own forum post when the OP is not me and is hidden. (As in OP hid the forum but I didn't hide my replies to that post.)

donovan_dmc said:
You'd have to get into postgres documentation for specifics, but just looking at the table structure should get you close enough

Thanks. That looks like ~64 bytes, being somewhat pessimistic about overheads, for an entry, plus the length of the body text. Call it 4000 + 64 for 'a post with 4000 bytes of body-text' (of course it should be understood that '4000 bytes' may constitute less than 4000 characters if Unicode characters > U+7f are used.
Then the BUR votes, ~48 bytes per vote, but averaging out to probably ~8 bytes or less per forum_post since a majority of forum posts are not of a type that can be voted on.
Then the index entries; there seem to be 6 relevant indexes; 4 are on properties I understand, so I'll guess 16 bytes for each of them (->64 bytes in total). Plus the other two: index_forum_posts_on_to_tsvector_english_body and index_forum_posts_on_lower_body_trgm. I don't know how text indexes work or even what the meaning is of having two indexing seemingly the same base data (body text), so I'd guess something generous for these: 200 bytes each?

64+4000+8+64+400 == 4536

4536 * 1000 = 4536000, so 4.5M for 1000 4000-byte posts?
But like I said, I'm pretty clueless about how much space text indexes actually use.

fluffysoup said:
On the completely differnt note, I don't know how to view my own forum post when the OP is not me and is hidden. (As in OP hid the forum but I didn't hide my replies to that post.)

.. can you use the forum post id, if you know it?

as in the link generated by typing forum #12345, eg:

forum #477890

(strangely, this is not documented in DText help . I feel like it was included previously, though...)

Is the post in question listed in the index accessible from your profile ( https://e621.net/forum_posts?search%5Bcreator_id%5D=1829714 ), or not? The second column in that search provides links to the individual forum posts (as opposed to the threads).

Updated

savageorange said:
.. can you use the forum post id, if you know it?

as in the link generated by typing forum #12345, eg:

forum #447890

(strangely, this is not documented in DText help . I feel like it was included previously, though...)

EDIT: .. it seems buggy? I meant to link to your question post, per the #forum_post_12345 part of the link underneath your avatar, but the link points a post by Donovan in a completely different thread. Hmm. Maybe that won't work, then.

Sadly I don't remember the number or the link to my post.
It's not even visible on my forum posts
I guess I gotta take a note next time...

fluffysoup said:
On the completely differnt note, I don't know how to view my own forum post when the OP is not me and is hidden. (As in OP hid the forum but I didn't hide my replies to that post.)

That is not possible. Once the OP hides the topic, then all of the replies to said topic are inaccessible until an admin unhides it.

This was, and I believe still is, a known issue for pending AIBURs, see topic #32087.
The OPs assume that hiding the topic equates to closing their requests, but that is not the case as the requests will still be floating around in the system without an accessible discussion thread.

Aacafah

Moderator

savageorange said:
as in the link generated by typing forum #12345, eg:

forum #477890

(strangely, this is not documented in DText help . I feel like it was included previously, though...)

...oh, come on. It is not "Deprecated", I'm putting it back.

thegreatwolfgang said:
This was, and I believe still is, a known issue for pending AIBURs, see topic #32087.
The OPs assume that hiding the topic equates to closing their requests, but that is not the case as the requests will still be floating around in the system without an accessible discussion thread.

I believe I added it to their help pages; hopefully, this limits how often it happens until we find a better solution.

aacafah said:

I believe I added it to their help pages; hopefully, this limits how often it happens until we find a better solution.

Looking back, is there a way to "unhide" a forum by mistake?