"Soft delete" in Social Groups

[Tracy Ballinger]

Is there any way I can change this to just a full delete? I'm going through taking off festivals as they pass, which is leaving the board cluttered with "This message has been deleted" posts.

[Scott Tichenor]

There should be an option right under that for "Physically remove". Is that not available?

[Tracy Ballinger]

No, the only option I have is "Soft Delete" and it won't let me uncheck the little circle. It's the Ohio Pickers Group

[Scott Tichenor]

I did some research on this at the support forum for this software and the opinions there were strong on both sides. Physical deletion of discussions by group owners is disabled by design. I can remove those because I have special administrative permission but I don't think I want to get into doing this on a routine basis and you probably wouldn't want to be asking me all the time.

I don't necessarily agree with their rationale for that design, but I can see instances where allowing the group owner to physically remove anything can be problematic. As users we assume resources are to be used as designed and that all intent is appropriate. As a site owner with a lot of experience I know that's not always the case. Since you can't have it both ways, the designers of the software decided to allow soft delete so that the information is retained, and there can be a lot of reasons for it being detained, including legal. Still, cumbersome in my opinion so I'm not trying to defend them, but I see the reasoning behind it.

The soft delete allows two things to occur: information is retained if necessary, people that posted see the message. I'd prefer group owners be allowed to turn off that message or that the site owner (me) be allowed the same, but doesn't work that way. <sigh>

An option might be to use the forums calendar function to list these but that's probably not a good solution There's also a possibility I believe to create a separate calendar function just for dedicated purposes, but I don't think you can pull that into the group so that's probably not a good idea. I personally wonder why it's important to remove all past events? That's certainly not the case with anything on this forum that I can think of. Information is presented and then retained. Because an event's time has passed doesn't mean that value of that information has ceased, and in fact, that historical record can be quite important to some--say a musician looking for gigs.

I will go ahead and delete those soft notices for now and await your response.

[Tracy Ballinger]

An option might be to use the forums calendar function to list these but that's probably not a good solution There's also a possibility I believe to create a separate calendar function just for dedicated purposes, but I don't think you can pull that into the group so that's probably not a good idea. I personally wonder why it's important to remove all past events? That's certainly not the case with anything on this forum that I can think of. Information is presented and then retained. Because an event's time has passed doesn't mean that value of that information has ceased, and in fact, that historical record can be quite important to some--say a musician looking for gigs.

I will go ahead and delete those soft notices for now and await your response.

Thank you for the research and explanation, Scott. I guess my main reason for deleting them is to just keep current info readily available so there isn't so much to wade through. I hadn't thought about it being a possible source of income for people! Good point; therefore I'll leave the rest of them.

Thanks again!