Whilst I completely take the point that there can be good reasons for deleting posts, I feel this is something that it's reasonable for a community to disapprove of as a general rule. Posting on a board is entering into a conversation, and there's a moral sense in which the ownership of the sense (or nonsense :-) in that conversation is shared, not sensibly partitionable between the participants.
Absolutely. This is how I personally feel about it-- I lean toward "community property" and a posts-as-conversation model, myself.
Privacy reasons-- absolutely understandable.
My other message board community has-- okay, even 'repeatedly'-- been the victim of the sulking, taking-my-toys-with-me hairflip variety of mass deletions, too.
That's a big part of why we REALLY turned off the ability for regular members to
delete posts. They can edit them to their hearts' content, but not make it as though they never posted in the first place.
We also have a 60 or 90s window for edits in which no edit notice is auto-generated on the post; after that, there's a notice generated, and it's standard, not user-generated or optional.
I have to say that I think that
both of those things are quite helpful in terms of running things smoothly and minimizing flame-wars that take moderator/administrator time.
We're using an open-source platform, though-- and some other pre-fab things are not so customizable without breaking into the code in a pretty hard-core manner. We didn't have some options with our older platform.
