As designed Hard Deleting thread doesn't affect reports for that thread

Alpha1

Alpha1

Well-known member
Affected version
1.5.14
If a thread is deleted then the report will link to non-existent content. Hard deleting a thread should affect the related reports.
Currently I have 180 Open reports about a hard deleted thread with a dead link in it. Which is rather useless.
I think the reports should be resolved or also deleted.
 
Not removing the report when the content is deleted is absolutely intentional.

Reports have always represented the content at the snapshot in time when the report was made. All of the report data is stored independent of the content for that reason. Deleting the report when the content is removed would definitely reduce the value of a report for historical information.

I don't really agree about automatic resolution either when it was a manual action taken by a moderator. 180 reports is certainly the edge case, but whoever dealt with the issue should generally be leaving a note as to the resolution taken (and why).
 
When a thread is hard deleted, then the reports are no longer actionable. This is why automatic resolution seems to be a logical action. IMHO there is no point in keeping reports for non-existent content in the report queue.

In general hard deletion permission should not given to low ranking staff members, so we can assume at least some authority/trust level in the actions of the staff member.
Mike said:
whoever dealt with the issue should generally be leaving a note as to the resolution taken (and why).
Click to expand...
The thread deletion reason could be used for this. Or simply the note that the thread was deleted.
Somewhat off topic: The note function is rather infrequently used on the big boards I am involved with.

it is indeed an edge case, but I am not the first one that encounters the problem. There are other threads here on the same topic.
 
On my busiest forum we always use the note function to let everyone know what action was taken and why. Simply having a report marked as "thread was hard deleted" without any reason given isn't that useful to us.

(Yes, notes are frustratingly limited in functionality - I'm hanging out for some major improvements to this functionality in XF 2.1)

I'm not as active on one of my other forums, so we found the inability for the mods to notify me about issues (assigning a report doesn't actually tell me about it) and the lack of visibility of discussions (no alerts or notifications) in notes - was too limiting, so we ended up turning off the report centre so we could use real threads and @ tags and so on - and the discussions show up in the New posts searches.

We'll be re-evaluating with XF 2.0 whether the ability to @ tag in report notes is enough to give us what we need to move back to using the report centre - but given how much discussion we have about reports on that site (we have a lot of kids on the autism spectrum on that site - so it's not always simple to deal with issues), I'm not sure it will be enough for us.

Either way, the detail about what action was taken and why is important to us - especially when dealing with serial troublemakers - so I would generally avoid wanting any reports auto-closed (even spam cleanup closing reports automatically is a bit disconcerting - but I'm okay with that case).
 

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