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.
As for your username being attached to the comment, that is an issue. I just checked, and yeah even logged out you still see it.
What needs to be done is the deleted comment should only have your username visible when you’re logged in - everyone else should see a blank username, maybe moderators should be able to see it though.
However I disagree about the timeout. I want to be able to recover my comments indefinitely. If there is to be a permanent deletion (and legally speaking there probably needs to be, one which removes it from the server) it should be an extra step.
There are, I guess, three front end levels.
Delete, moderator delete (invisible to all but mods, at least for top level posts), and Purge (admin level, wipes the content from the local database).
I’m hoping to have a bit of a dive and an experiment once things have settled down here a bit.