Newbies - AMA

Confused? Curious about anything? Need some help? Not sure how something works?

Leave your question below and one of the community or I will hopefully have the answer.

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Why can’t you delete your posts?

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Poor sean

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Just ask @moderators

It’s to prevent people starting a debate and removing their post that people are reacting to… and potentially deleting all their replies too.

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It’s an odd system, and unique to this forum isn’t it? So it’s more important that someone else’s post in reaction to my post shouldn’t be read without context, than it is for me to be able to change my mind about something I’ve posted (more than a couple of minutes after I’ve hit post)? It’s definitely put me off posting more than once. Many more times. Can’t it just say “this post was deleted” wrt to context for other posts?

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I think this is definitely something worth taking into account.

This isn’t something I’m blaming the mods for, they do an excellent job but there are times where I’ve seen posters request that a post is deleted and it can take hours for it to happen purely because of availability.

It might be something to properly consider. There can be any number of reasons someone wants a post to be deleted and if replies are taken with it then so be it.

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Not sure that’s true TBH. The standard of most forums has always been to stop short of deletion outright.

Not to say things shouldn’t change, just that this was how it was and I think probably still is in Discourse world.

(I have not checked if you can delete your own posts in the Discourse meta forum TBF)

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It’s an overhang from a completely different time in the forum, when people were more edgelord and lots of forum members were more concerned with moderators and admins having too much control as well as tolerating shitposters more.

This meant that if I wanted to ban someone I really needed to be able to say, “look at this guy’s past posts”. These days the forum is more likely to accept that someone was a shit in the past even if they’ve deleted those times they tried a bit of trolling awfulness.

So yeah, I agree personal post deletion should be fine now.

I have no idea if the settings actually allow for it as I’ve not seen that part of the site in years.

We can probably lose the tight edit time limit too.

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I can’t think of a single other forum I’ve ever been on where you couldn’t delete your own posts

Not sure I’ve been one where you could but it’s been at least a decade since I was on any other and they’d have been vBulletin or PHPNuke etc

Had a look at Discourse meta and deleting your own posts seems to be possible but I didn’t click the link as I don’t have any I’d want to nuke.

Looking back I think DiS was probably unusual in having no editing and no deleting in the old days before Discourse. Most places seemed to do editing so people would edit to delete the content, or were more bulletin board like DiS so you could kill a post. Given the original version had no user login I guess it didn’t matter if you couldn’t delete as you had no idea who anyone really was.

When we moved here unlimited editing was definitely available and the community opposed that as not being the spirit of the way DiS was so the edit time limit plus visible edit history was introduced.

Probably good to remove visible history and bring in post deletion plus unlimited editing.

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What does “the TV” stand for?

Thinly veiled which is a reference to “Thinly veiled ‘I have a partner’” from the tongue in cheek assumption we’re all undateable boring music nerds. Ie the TV is your partner

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Can you believe Jake Bugg’s had five albums out?

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What does it mean when a certain band or song “doesn’t exist”? Is it just that they’re popular, or is it something deeper?

Not unique, no.

Rare then? I’ve just (out of interest, not because I really needed to) edited a post on a popular tech forum that I first submitted 13 years ago, no problems. I think I’d struggle to edit a post on here from 13 minutes ago

Well there’s this thread, if this is the kind of thing you mean?

There’s a bit of leeway with the definition, but I’d say it’s a release which, despite having a certain level of clout (maybe a film with a big budget or well-known stars, etc) has made no real impact on popular culture and may as well not have existed.

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Ah right, got it! Thanks