Can't Indefinitely Delete Comments Anymore?

One of the things I liked about the commenting system here was that I could delete a comment whenever with no time limit. I'm pretty neurotic when it comes to commenting, and I liked having the freedom to delete comments whenever if I ever regretted posting them. Now it seems like there's a 4 minute time limit on deleting comments. So, why add it now? Not sure what the benefit could be. If it has to do with negative comments/trolling, wouldn't the mods delete those comments anyway? Never really understood why most sites limit it.

Edit: Also, it looks like they've added the option to delete forum threads you've started, which is an addition that makes sense (before you had to send a pm request to the mods).

seems like part of the moderation changes they're rolling out. maybe making you think a bit more before you post, haha...

Yeah I've noticed that, can you now moderate your own thread into the bug reporting thread there buddy where this would belong?

At least you can still edit it indefinitely (unless that got changed too 0_o). As long as they don't time lock editing than I'd be fine

It's a weird change.

Well, it seems someone moved it for me, but I really don't think this is a bug. It seems like an intended feature.

So I cant viciously insult other users and then delete my posts anymore?

I suppose I could just edit it to pretend I said something nice.

@rongalaxy: It can't be a bug, there's text that tells you you can't delete anymore.

If I had to guess it's more because of that problem they mentioned before with posts being deleted, but still counting in the thread to some extent because deleted posts were still visible for mods and such; leading to the problem of the 'last page' or whatever button in the forums not actually getting you to the last page because of numerous deleted posts in between messing something up.

I moved it here. Generally this is the best place to discuss site features, even if they're not precisely bugs.

This issue is probably my fault; apparently GameSpot did not previously feature any support for users to delete their posts and implemented this feature to give users over there a limited window to delete double posts or other problematic posts. They asked me if I wanted this on GB and I said sure; since I always have staff access to delete posts, I didn't even realize that users have always had the ability to delete posts, so I interpreted this as a benefit rather than a restriction of what we previously allowed. That's my bad.

I'll discuss this with the moderators and the engineers and see about either removing the restriction or at least increasing the timer on this to make it less punitive. In the meantime, feel free to send a PM to the mods if you need a post deleted.

@rorie: That's good to hear. The ability to delete comments later has often been helpful for people, and the unlimited nature of it didn't really have negatives that I was aware of. If there -had- to be a limit on the time, something rather substantial would be nice.

Thanks for looking into it.

In which cases, though? Are you saying that with something specific in mind, or are you just saying that you like the feature in general?

It gives enough of a time frame to delete a double post (due to either a bug or an error on my part). That's been the only reason for me to delete comments, but I suppose it's more important to other people.

Usually it's just helpful when GB is being glitchy. So, like how recently some comments take a few minutes to show up, and it's helpful to be able to delete if someone already replied in that time(making yours meaningless). That happened to me maybe twice in the last week. Accidental Double Posts are probably the most common reason though.

The wide ability to Edit is generally good enough, but sometimes deleting is good. A hour limit though would probably work just as well as the current infinite limit.

Well people do post stuff that they later think better of, or they post personal or detailed information that they later want to remove. I can't recall ever going back and deleting an old post of mine, even one that was only an hour old, even though I can delete anything at any time I want including entire topics or blogs.

In theory if it was known that posts were "permanent" people would take more care in what they posted, but that probably isn't the case. That, and being able to delete comments at will can sometimes make threads look a little confusing to those who can't see deleted posts. Plus, don't forget that users can't delete others that have quoted them in topics...which, if the user had said something particularly delete worthy, it was probably quoted a bunch of times anyway. When we delete topics that we want completely gone, we go through and either delete or edit comments that quoted the one that was removed as well, and sometimes it can be quite time consuming.

Also, everyone should keep in mind that when you delete one of your own topics or threads, it isn't truly deleted. It just becomes hidden for those without the correct permissions to see it.

Yeah...I really don't like the idea of users being able to completely delete their own topics, though. It's a discussion forum - people put a lot of time and effort into the replies they make to topics. For the topic creator just to be able to wipe all of those out at any time for any reason doesn't really fit in with the spirit of the forums. The person who starts the topic is just that, the one who starts the discussion - not the owner of it. This is one of the reasons we rarely delete topics, and only do so unless they are so offensive or otherwise bad that there is no other way to save them. We usually don't even delete topics upon request from the topic creator.

If someone is going to start a topic that they may want to delete later, then it probably should have been restricted to their blog in the first place, or not even started at all.

I believe GameSpot has also requested that users have the ability to delete their own topics, but due to concerns very similar to yours I've expressed the desire for the timer on this to be fairly short if it rolls out to GB/CV.

Yeah. I agree about full threads. I like infinite editing and deleting on comments, but for threads, that doesn't quite make sense. Could hurt users putting time into replies. It's bad enough when I'm writing a big reply and then the thread ends up locked. ha. A hour limit on thread deletion might be okay. Or even just 15 min. Give time for people to say "hey, there's already another of these" and allow people to delete without needing mods.

Now that you've gone in depth about it, giving us the ability to delete or lock threads isn't really that great of an idea. Unless you're constantly making threads that go off the rails and need to be locked, this problem is easily solved by pming the mods and having you guys decide if it should be locked or not. Giving everyone that power seems ripe for abuse.

Yeah. It might be nice to allow users that screw up a poll or post a dupe to have a small window of time to delete a thread, but I wouldn't make it any more than ~5 minutes.

On that note: can somebody implement a feature where the message "Pack your shit, the thread's been locked" flashes at the top if you're typing a reply in a thread that's just been locked? (It doesn't have to be that message, but you get the gist.) The ingredients seem to be there, at least.

Being able to edit Polls would be huge in that regard, but being able to delete in a few minutes could be a nice stopgap for that.

I'm a stickler for duders not posting spoilers in threads that aren't marked as such, and there have been many cases over the years where, in talking to other users about them, deleting my own posts was very useful. I hope this is gonna make sense:

- Someone (usually not maliciously) drops a spoiler as a comment in the thread

- A few comments down (as time has passed) I suggest that they put a spoiler tag/spoiler block or rephrase what was said

- They then write another comment usually saying, "Oh yeah, no problem." or some other lovely thing.

So the initial spoilery post has been edited and is all good, but now there's another post from me asking for something which now has already happened, and potentially another post later from the person I was taking to. So we're left with two useless and confusing posts clogging up the flow of a thread (and kind of making me look like a jerk... well, more like a jerk), that I could then easily delete.

A pretty specific and not very big problem to be sure, but it was nice to have the option to tidy those kind of interactions up.

If not allowing deletions of user's own posts after a certain amount of time has passed is a positive thing that you and the mods are in favor of, perhaps a good compromise would be to have that be in effect for new users, but let the ability to delete posts indefinitely open up to users with a specific high post count, similar with edits not being moderated in the wiki if you've done it enough. (although I'm sure something like that would be a ton of extra programming work).

Thanks for the consideration of all this stuff!

So... I guess this is just gonna be how things are now then? Is this going to be 'fixed' eventually, or what...?

Edit: Also I had to go through the bug reporting topic one page at a time using Ctrl+F for the word "delete" to find this topic. Search function still as great as it ever was.

I thought that was the intended way to search for a thread ;)

Pro tip: If you are looking for a specific thread go on google and use the term "site:giantbomb.com" at the start of your search. Usually pretty effective.

I tried google but couldn't remember the exact name of the thread, which was an issue. My next plan was to go through my post history since I knew I'd commented on this in the past. Nice tip though.

Edit: It occurs to me that the mods might be distracted by the controversy of the week. Hopefully one of them takes the time to notice this thread anyways, though.

@make_me_mad: What controversy are you referring to?

One that can't be talked about publicly on the forums. Don't worry about it.

So now I can't delete my comments until 30 days after posting. @rorie did you ever figure out whether something can be done about this?

@hunter5024: Hah! That's obviously a bug. Let me check with the engineer in the morning and see if we can't just get rid of this timer altogether.

@rorie: Thanks!