Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Deleting PM messages after sending

I don't know if this topic has come up before, but I've noticed the lack so I thought I might speak up. The ability to edit a post after sending it is nice and I have no arguments with the time constraint on editing it. But there have been a couple of times when I came back to a post an hour later and didn't like it and wanted to completely rewrite it. Or, in a recent case, my rp partner accidentally responded in our IC thread with a pm meant for our OOC thread. It's sort of thrown off the whole thread but he didn't notice until it was too late to change. I thought it might be nice to be able to delete specific pms. But with some conditions. Perhaps, like with adding new people to a pm thread, you'd need the agreement of everyone in the thread before you could delete it. And perhaps only the most recent post could be deleted? To keep people from abusing the deletion? I'm not sure. It's just come up often enough now I thought I might say something. Thanks for reading this rather rambling post. >.<

The main reason that this isn't a feature is because trolls could send nasty messages and then delete them. That's also why there is a 15 minute time limit on being able to edit pms because of this. I mean I suppose it could maybe work if everyone in the pm had to agree for deletion, but I don't know how easily that could be coded in.

We have ways of looking at deleted/edited posts/pms and etc if they have been used for harassment, so that's not actually part of the reason for it any longer.

I've always mentally modeled PMs after emails or letters, where once you send it, it belongs to the person who received it. They can then keep it, refer back to it later, treasure it or discard it as they see fit. It becomes something privately sent, rather than publicly performed. This is why PMs can't be edited after 15 minutes; they are "owned" by the person who received them in the sense of deciding whether they want to keep it or not.

Regarding being able to delete individual PMs if everyone agrees to do so -- it's within the spirit of how I want PMs to run, but would be a ton of code and interfaces for a rarely truly needed feature. I will probably not implement it any time soon, sorry!

I don't know much about coding myself so I wasn't sure whether that was the case or not, which is why I decided to say something. Better to ask and be told no than remain silent and ignorant. Thanks for taking the time to respond in any case!

Yes indeed! No harm at all in asking or suggesting.