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Comments on Permanently delete duplicated questions and answers?

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Permanently delete duplicated questions and answers?

+3
−0

I accidentally posted my neighbor's answer to my same question twice. Obviously, it's irksome and wasteful to see the two duplicated answers! How can such duplications be lastingly forever removed?

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+2
−2

I'm pretty sure you can't.

Of course, it would be technically possible for someone with database access to go in and permanently delete a post. But no such feature is exposed in the UI, up to and including users with administrator access.

Deleted posts are also only visible to a subset of users (bugs notwithstanding), so this isn't a big problem in practice.

I have seen some cases where the owner of a post has edited it to delete the actual content, when duplicates were posted, and simply indicate something like "this was a duplicate of <some other post by link>". For situations where the content is truly a duplicate, and especially where the post is long, this is probably the best (or least bad) option; but do note that it still does nothing to change the licensing status of the originally posted content.

Another at least potential issue is that such a permanent deletion feature would go contrary to the fact that the CC BY-SA 4.0 license is irrevocable. (My emphasis below.) At the very least, such deletion would make it more difficult to show that some content was provided under some specific license, as also to some extent discussed elsewhere.

Section 2 - Scope.

a. License grant.
1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to:
A. reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part; and
B. produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material.

(When you post to Codidact under that license, "You" includes Codidact as the initial licensee.)

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2 comment threads

No admin interface. (4 comments)
Irrevocability (2 comments)
No admin interface.
Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

Just to answer a question in this post: no, admins don't have an interface for that either. If a deleted post is getting in the way (perhaps because it's long), the best thing to do would be to edit it. The original is still available in the history should anybody need to review it, but the deleted post would be easier to skip past.

deleted user wrote almost 3 years ago

If we remove a post that way then we will face 500 error which we faced earlier in Writing CD.

Canina‭ wrote almost 3 years ago

deleted user That wouldn't be a given. Even if that was because of a post deletion (I don't know whether that's the case), if a post is hard-deleted properly, it should be as though that post never existed. The non-existence of the post should then not have any effect on anything else, just as was the case before the post was created.

deleted user wrote almost 3 years ago

Canina‭ If you hard-delete a post then it will affect some users statistics so you must make changes to statistics for that reason it will be tough to do (but it's possible to do). Why will you affect an user's statistics? They have invest their time to do those things so shouldn't make changes to statistics. So if we don't affect users statistics than table of users in database will be unchanged while there will be change to posts table we can assume that an ID isn't available in post table but available in users table so user will want to fetch that ID but they can't which will cause error.