Can't I Always Delete a Message that I Posted?

[rslitman]

Cutting to the chase - Am I not allowed to delete a message if a new message has been posted to the topic by someone else, even if that message doesn't Quote mine in a response? Or should I have gotten the Delete option in the situation described below?

More detailed information:

Yesterday, I posted a message that was critical of a decision made by a public transportation authority. It was in the middle of a fairly active topic. Within an hour or two, I decided to delete it. One new message had appeared in this topic. It did not pertain to my message but to other things in general that were brought up earlier in the topic. It appeared to be posted as a "Post Reply", not as a "Quote", so the software no doubt was not able to determine that it did not refer to this topic.

I did not get an option to delete my message, only to edit it. So what I did was to remove the text of my earlier response and just put in a placeholder line to note that I was deleting what I said earlier but couldn't physically delete it.

[Patrick Boylan]

Memory dims, but I think that's the reaction I got too, once there's a subsequent post in the same thread I lose the ability to delete.
In this thread I submitted the prior paragraph, and am now editing it. In the edit post window I can now see "delete post"

[Patrick Boylan]

I have now hit 'post reply' again

and am editing this post, I can still see 'delete post' and its check mark, I assume I can still delete this post.

Now of course I need to search out the post you're talking about so I can make sure I haven't missed some scandalously fun gossip.

[rslitman]

I was peeved over SEPTA (public transportation agency in the Philadelphia area) announcing a system-wide shutdown a day in advance without seeing what was going to happen.

I also posted this in response to the announcement on SEPTA's Facebook page, using a mobile device. It's not easy to delete a post using the mobile web browser version of Facebook, so when I had second thoughts a few minutes later, I went to my real computer and decided to delete it. By then, though, my "inconsiderate" response had drawn one very nasty reply and a few others that were critical in a more polite way. I did eventually delete my original posting there, too, but I left a new message apologizing for my feelings and to let people know why there were responses to something that's no longer there.

The fact that no one jumped in and criticized my Railroad.net posting shows that we are a nicer bunch here. (Of course, it also shows that we have a lot fewer people [NOT ppl] posting here than Facebook.)

[lirr42]

You can delete your post only if it is the last post made in the thread. If someone else (or yourself) makes another post in that thread, then you can no longer delete it. Like you probably could have deleted your last post up to now, but now that I've posted in this thread, you can no longer delete that post. Additionally you lose the ability to delete your post after a reasonable amount of time (like a day or so, it seems).

So to sum up: You can delete your post within a day of posting as long as nobody else has posted another post.

[Otto Vondrak]

WARNING: i am no longer the admin, I am commenting on historical practice.

Years ao we had a problem with a user named David Telesha who decided to leave this site and take all his posts with him. He began "blanking" each of his hundreds of posts one by one until I caught him and stopped him. Such activity is called "vandalism" in the discussion community, when you otherwise alter or destroy the meaning of old posts or discussions. I was able to reconstruct some of David's posts from Google cache, but not all. We also had a problem with some users going back and removing incriminating statements or otherwise trying to "cover their tracks" about some misdeed or insult or whatever. When Mike Roque and I were the admins, we tweaked the software to reduce the amount of time you had to edit a post. I forget what that timeframe is... It's enough if you make an honest mistake you can go back and make an edit, but not long enough for you to edit a post from 2004.

In short, if you wouldn't want to see if on the front page of the New York Times, don't post it on the Internet.

I'm not the admin, so do not complain to me about this policy.

-otto-