Comment deletion outside of your own journal
Title
Comment deletion outside of your own journal
Short, concise description of the idea
I'd like to see it changed so that users can NOT delete comments they make outside of their own journals or communities.
Full description of the idea
The problem is that since users are able to delete ANY comment they make, in or out of their own journal, it allows them to troll personal journals and communities only to go back later and delete the evidence. I know there are options available to prevent this, such as freezing threads, and there's the option of screencapping in order to provide evidence of TOS violations, but these are limited solutions.
Frankly it doesn't make sense for a user to be able to delete comments made outside of their own journal. If you post something in my journal, it stands to reason that you forfeit the right to be able to retract it through deletion later.
I have had problems in the past (and am having it right now) of trolls posting a string of abusive, TOS-violating comments in my personal blog only to see those comments deleted when before I have the chance to report them. Yes, I know that there are effective means for preventing users from trolling your blog, i.e. bannings and f-locking entries and such. But the fact remains that just having the ability to delete comments after posting them is a flaw of LJ's coding that trolls DO take advantage of in order to harrass people. While it is great to have ways of blocking abusive users, it only makes sense to remove the ability of users to delete comments outside of their own journals so that when people DO troll blogs, the trolled users will find it that much easier to report them and/or have them blacklisted. It's that much harder to do when the trolls are able to delete the evidence of their trolling.
An ordered list of benefits
- Quite simply it WILL reduce the amount of trolling if trolls find that they won't be able to leave strings of comments that they immediately delete, thereby managing to harrass other users while removing the evidence before their comments can be reported either to LJ Abuse OR to community maintainers.
- The benefit to THAT is that it will make it that much more efficient to have TOS-violators blacklisted from communities or to have the trolling users' accounts banned.
- I really don't see any problems. I can see the potential complaint being raised by users who want to be able to delete their comments at will, and it's likely that they'll put out the examples of wanting to delete accidental double-posted comments or say that they want to be able to delete comments if they belatedly decide said comment was inappropriate or whatever. But the rebuttal to that is that it's just not that big a deal if someone makes a double-post, and if it's in someone else's journal and they are that troubled by a double-post, they have the option of asking the journal owner/community mod to delete the double-comment.
- As for the other, the answer to that is that if you are going to be inclined to delete a comment after the fact if you don't like the response it's getting...you probably shouldn't be posting it at all. You shouldn't have the right to weasel out of an uncomfortable discussion by deleting a comment and trying to pretend you never posted it.