A post delete feature

January 4, 2002 12:09 AM

A post delete feature. My school's internal bbs does this by only allowing you to delete your post if it was the last post to that thread or FP, so no replier ends up looking crazy. Might clear up a lot of duplicate/angry posts.
posted by skyline to Feature Requests at 12:09 AM (12 comments total)

you're forced to preview. preview.

it looks just like it's posted! you can pretend like you've already posted and fix all your mistakes.

why don't people take preview seriously?
posted by palegirl at 1:25 AM on January 4, 2002

Here is a stupid idea that just popped into my head... maybe the preview page should have a 10 minute timer before the POST button is activated, so the poster can think about what he/she has said. Maybe we could build a bad word/agressive grammar detector that prompts the user if he/she really wants to post the blathering he/she typed. Or, a breathalizer that won't allow drunks to post (like in a car owned by a known DUI offender).

Seriously, delete just doesn't work in this format. Unless, the criteria to allow a delete would be that no other IP address has viewed the post. Then the delete would be ok- like recalling a message in Outlook.

The preview functionality seems more direct.
posted by internook at 3:42 AM on January 4, 2002

palegirl: it looks just like it's posted! you can pretend like you've already posted and fix all your mistakes.

Maybe Matt can add in a routine to add a few snarky, made-up comments in the Preview? Maybe it can perform a search of the MeFi database and put in a "double post!" comment by a random user. Yeah, that's the ticket....
posted by hijinx at 6:27 AM on January 4, 2002

Actually, it would be nice to put the preview on the client to save the round trip to the server. This would alleviate 1/2 of the traffic caused by posting. It can be done with a SPAN tag and some javascript... just a thought.
posted by internook at 9:50 AM on January 4, 2002

Hey, I don't have any personal tendency to post dupes or angry stuff. I just figure this would save Matt some cleanup time, while keeping with the self-policing theme. Remember, the only post you'd see that had a possibility of disappearing would be the very last one; and on the off chance that it does, then you can delete. It works well on our system; I've never seen it cause a conflict.
posted by skyline at 12:01 PM on January 4, 2002

i have only posted to metafilter while drunk once. otherwise, preview does help, but as with proofreading anything you have written yourself, i know i tend not to be as thorough as can be while previewing my posts. (normally the bit about the drunken posting would be ha-ha-only-joking, but in this case, it's ha-ha-only-serious. yikes.)
posted by moz at 12:16 PM on January 4, 2002

sorry skyline, I'm not going to add a delete function, I've seen it cause far too many problems in other (mostly UBB-based) communities.

Preview as much as you want, but once you post, it's set in stone.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:27 PM on January 4, 2002

More truth is to be found in the things people shouldn't have said, anyway.
A delete function would suck the id out of people's replies.
posted by dong_resin at 7:58 PM on January 4, 2002

shut up fag!
posted by fuq at 11:50 AM on January 5, 2002

woah! Sorry about that! posted out of anger! i'm so sorry! I wish I could take it back. even though I stared at it for 20 minutes while it was being previewed, I still want to take it back
posted by fuq at 11:51 AM on January 5, 2002

I forgive you, boysucker.
posted by dong_resin at 2:31 PM on January 5, 2002

See? No harm done.
posted by dong_resin at 2:31 PM on January 5, 2002