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

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Mon, 28 Jul 2014 at 09:29:53, Alex Charron wrote:
> On 2014-07-27 21:12, Xyne wrote:
> > On 2014-07-27 11:29 +1200
> > David Phillips wrote:
> >
> >>> So maybe we should clean them up occasionally?
> >> Makes sense. A TU's hardly going to receive complaints about abuse 12
> >> -- or even 6 -- months after the incident.
> > Even 3 months would be enough to report abuse.
> >
> > Alternatively, add a "report abuse" button that stores a copy of the comment. It
> > can then be reviewed even if the original comment is deleted. The copy can be
> > deleted when the report is closed (or after some interval). This would also be
> > less tedious than scanning through all the duplicate comments posted due to the
> > absence of an edit function.

I am not sure about that. Users could delete their comment before anyone
has a chance to report it and subscribers would still have the insult in
their incoming mail. Then again, you could argue that the abuser could
just as well have send a private email to everyone...

Let me describe another scenario that happened: A package maintainer did
not want to update a completely broken AUR package and told the users
that the package is fine and that he won't do anything. After some
discussion, one of the upset users filed an orphan request. Thereupon,
the package maintainer deleted all of his comments, claiming that he
would never have said something like that. And indeed, it was very hard
to tell whether the maintainer replied to the comments or not (without
having a look at the deleted ones). Would a "Report Abuse" button help
here?

> I much prefer the idea of storing reported comments. This confirms that
> the comment was posted while not keeping deleted comments. Another
> option would be to allow a window in which comments can be deleted
> without penalty, then disallowing deletion after some threshold. TUs
> would still be able to delete comments then, but the users that posted
> them wouldn't.
> 
> I don't like the idea of keeping deleted comments not because there's
> any useful/private information in them, but out of principle that you
> shouldn't keep content from a user that they chose to delete without a
> good reason to do so.
> 

This contradicts itself. You want to give the user the freedom to delete
their comments but on the other hand you disallow deleting comments
after a short period of time. Right now, a user can (at any time) delete
everything he posted in AUR comments so that only a very small group of
trusted people (~50) will still be able to read it. When implementing
the time window idea, everyone will be able to read the comments if you
do not act quickly enough.

Note that I will not change the comments deletion feature before the
3.4.0 release but I am open for suggestions and discussion. Maybe we can
reach a consensus that allows us to close FS#14840 [1] and FS#34690 [2].

Regards,
Lukas

[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/14840
[2] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/34690