rdearman wrote:And we are not talking about people who are editing words, or changing sentences here and there. We're talking about someone who goes into their post and replaces it with nothing.
I get how much of a ball ache it is, especially on a live system where you don't want to be making all of these edits & of course is time consuming. All that stuff I can totally understand, I wouldn't want to do that either and I work in web development and you're doing this on a voluntary basis, so it would be unfair to expect you to do all that plus the risk of live SQL changes. Don't get me wrong there, I'm not gonna wish that on you, especially on a voluntary basis.
The missing piece for me is, if say, somebody completely deleted everything in their post. Why is it imperative to restore it?
I get why maybe it's ideal to restore it & I would agree it's better for things like flow & conversation and that people should ideally go another way about it. But what's the worst that'll happen if you don't? If somebody wants their post back, tough, they deleted their own post.
Is it a case that it results in a null value in the database that causes errors in the PHPBB software and pretty much breaks the thread as a result of an oversight by PHPBB? If so, then I get why it's such an issue, then my feedback on visibility & emphasis I think are relevant, especially if the idea is about prevention, so you don't end up having to fix anything & wasting time on something you shouldn't have to do. A harsh punishment is only a deterrent if people not only know it, but they remember it. Where it sits in the rules is easy to miss and so unemphasised that it's easy to forget.
But if it's just a blank post? It's not ideal as I get it affects the flow of discussion & can make things confusing but then lots of things people can do on a forum end up not being ideal and don't get an automatic ban and those things could also contribute to confusion & hurt the flow of discussion. People can sometimes also misunderstand or misinterpret rules and at least strikes gives them room to correct that when discovering they're wrong.
And where I've seen people do it, it might by they've got ratio'd, harassed or they're embarrassed by what they've posted & so on, it's not necessarily a malicious thing where somebody cannot be trusted. It's natural to try and delete it in some cases and sometimes people end up editing the post to do that, especially if it's the first post in a thread (because forums don't often let you delete your own threads) and it's not an offense on all forums.