When I “delete” a comment, all it does is replace the text with “deleted by creator”. It doesn’t even hide my username. This is different from previous behaviour where the comment was entirely removed from the public view.
I should be in control of my comment. If I want to delete it then it should be entirely removed - at least from the public view. I don’t want to make comments knowing that I’m permenantly etching my username into the stone of the thread forever with no ability to delete it. I’m highly put off from engaging now that I can’t reliably delete what I write.
Being able to undo the deletion is fine but the undo really should only last 1h or maybe 24h before the comment is properly deleted.
Part of this was a fix for the broken threads. It’s not really fair for a user to delete their comment and then completely remove all the other comments underneath. Before one of the recent updates, the threads underneath would get completely buggered, killing the conversation.
It’s not hard to see how this could be used maliciously. Someone could say something, be corrected and put in their place, only for them to delete their top comment and spoil the conversation.
The far bigger issue is that you can actually view the deleted comment. I’ve done it in Jerboa, simply starting a reply to the deleted comment lets you see it.
Someone did that to me once; it was very frustrating. They posted a wrong thing, got corrected by me and others, their post got downvoted and the corrections got upvoted. So they delete their comment (and ours) and repost the same thing again. Get corrected again, votes pan out again…so they do it again. Basically repeated the trick until the others in the conversation gave up and left them to it.
Glad to hear it’s fixed.