Deleting comments in communities

[kinvore]

Title
Deleting comments in communities

Short, concise description of the idea
Have the ability to keep members from deleting comments of others in communities.

Full description of the ideaAs a moderator of a fairly active political discussion community, at times I've had to threaten bans and the like for people deleting the comments of others. Can

Comments

[lady_angelina]

I thought that the only ones who could delete others' comments were the authors of entries and community maintainers. Are you talking about the authors of entries deleting other people's comments?

[kinvore]

Yes, the authors. I think we should have an option where that's not allowed in a community, where only admins can do so.

[lady_angelina]

Thanks for clarifying that! ^^

Hmmm... I can't explain exactly why, but it feels like preventing authors of community entries from deleting those comments would be drama waiting to happen. =/ Like you said under "Problems," suppose all of the community maintainers were on hiatus for a while, and a troll/spambot posted an offensive or page-breaking comment, like an enormous image, on a non-maintainer's entry? They and other readers would be stuck with it until the maintainers returned.

[azurelunatic]

They'd still be able to screen and freeze, right?

[thelittlevoice]

Sometimes OPs can help to monitor the content of posts. If something gets out of hand or somehting inappropriate is posted, they should be able to freeze, delete, or screen comments and let maintainers deal with it. I can see both sides, though.

[kinvore]

Yes they can help, but I'd rather leave that job to the mods. Keep in mind I just want this as an option, if a community wants to have comments deletable by OPs then they should still be able to do so.

[thelittlevoice]

Mods can't deal with that type of stuff, though. Only maintainers can. And depending on the number of maintainers, things will have to wait to be dealt with. In a way it is good that OPs have a little bit of control over it since maintainers can't be around 24-7.

But I get what you're saying. I've seen OPs abuse the power by deleting comments. I've seen that same abuse with screening and freezing, too.

[kinvore]

Well now you're talking semantics. Yes I mean admins/maintainers, we just tend to call them mods in my community. ;)

+1

[mlady_rebecca]

I like this idea.

As a moderator, I hate hearing about drama (even a few hours late) and seeing that everything was already deleted in one way or another.

[foxfirefey]

I...think I'm okay with this. Of course, what it means is those people are probably just going to delete the post entirely, but hey, that's just the way it goes.

[thelittlevoice]

Good point. If OPs can't delete a comment, there goes the whole post...and any 'evidence' of abuse disappears along with it. Either way, deletions can still occur.

[foxfirefey]

Well, yes, but this means deletions will necessarily be wholesale, instead of an OP only picking and choosing who to delete, which makes things a lot more confusing.

[azurelunatic]

Usually when a 'prevent people from deleting comments' idea comes up, it involves people being unable to delete their own comments, which is not so hot of an idea, actually. I like this variant.