allow undeletion of posts for a short time after deletion

[lithiana]

Title
allow undeletion of posts for a short time after deletion

Short, concise description of the idea
after a post is deleted, there should be a period of time (say, 30 days) during which the post can be undeleted. after that time, the post should be purged, so that it can never be undeleted.

Full description of the ideasometimes, it would be nice

Comments

[licon]

I can see this being useful, but not for 30 days. 1 day should be enough for an "oops" deletion; any more than that and you should be able to get it from backups (in the case of a malicious deletion).

[azurelunatic]

I'd say 72 hours.

While I'm sure it is possible for developers to access backups and restore entries that have been deleted, historically this has been reserved for LiveJournal-side technical problems causing disappearing entries, not for account compromise situations. As horrible as it is to have an account compromise, I would not like to set a precedent of disturbing the developers and requiring a manual restoration for anything short of an LJ-side catastrophe.

[andy]

Yes, and implementing ability for the Abuse team to mark the journal in such a way that deleted entries are not purged when the time comes would be awesome.

[marta]

While I'm sure it is possible for developers to access backups and restore entries that have been deleted,

I don't think it's actually that possible. While under certain circumstances maybe some things could be found through a lot of work and pounding on things, I don't think it's actually really that possible in most situations.

ETA: sorry, still on first cup of coffee. I hope this makes sense.

[azurelunatic]

I get where you're going at, which was the same place that I was, although you were taking a more direct path. Currently while technically possible, in that all things are possible, it would probably take trained monkeys, monkey wrenches, mucking about in the middle of things that are not intended to be mucked about in, and lots of cursing. Thus, no, in short.

[intrepia]

My understanding of the current situation, which could of course be vastly flawed, is that backups are only available on a site-wide basis, not an individual journal basis, so retrieving something would involve restoring all of LiveJournal to the way it was at some point in the past, or something similarly convoluted.

[intrepia]

I feel like there might be implementation problems that I'm not thinking of, but in principle and with these modifications, I could get behind this.

Err... oops, this was supposed to be in reply to your comment about community maintainers' decision on this overriding that of the user who posted an entry in a community. (That and the 24-72 hours - I might go with 48 - are the "modifications" I meant.) Although upon further thought... what if a user deletes an entry in a community because they want it gone, and the community maintainers decide to undelete it and refuse to redelete it?

[azurelunatic]

That sounds as if it would be an Abuse issue.

[intrepia]

Well, probably LJ would have to come up with some policy about that before implementing this feature.