[aur-dev] [PATCH] Make deleted comments visible to Trusted Users

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2014 at 15:39:13, Xyne wrote:
> On 2014-07-25 19:49 +0200
> Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, 25 Jul 2014 at 18:42:22, Xyne wrote:
> >> On 2014-07-25 11:31 +0200
> >> Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> >> 
> >> >This allows Trusted Users to check whether a user posted a politically
> >> >incorrect comment, even if he already deleted it.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Why keep "deleted" comments? How long are they kept?
> >> 
> >
> >Yes. Forever.
> 
> Is there some technical reason for not deleting comments? If not, please
> (re)consider actually deleting them. Keeping them is simultaneously a waste of
> bits and a bit creepy.
> 

Obviously, there is no way to check whether a user insulted someone else
(or misbehaved in some other way) and deleted the comments afterwards if
we remove them immediately. Some users even suggested to drop the
comment deletion feature [1], although for slightly different reasons. I
personally think it is fine to keep deleted comments and only show them
to Trusted Users -- they are trusted after all.

Regarding the "waste of bits" argument, I would have guessed that the
amount of deleted comments is negligibly small but it turns out that
these comments account for ~10% of all AUR comments. So maybe we should
clean them up occasionally?

[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/14840