Several times I've seen accounts deleted either
intentionally (with regret setting in quickly) or
unintentionally. More frequently I see people accidentally
delete other people's annotations.
I really appreciate that we can delete anything we want
associated with our user name or ideas,
but I would like to
propose the following functionality to reduce accidental
deletion:
1) For any idea or personal annotation that has been added
in the last 72 hours, delete functions as it does now.
2) For any idea or annotation older than 72 hours and for
annotations made by others, deleting hides the text and
user name, but leaves a placeholder. The user who
deleted these gets a link on their "overview" and "recent"
page that allows notifying them that they have deleted
items and allowing them to undelete them. After 72 hours
the deletion would become permanent and placeholders
could go away along with any hope of easily recovering the
text.
My thinking is that any deletion after 72 hours is really not
time critical because that page may have been cached
somewhere anyway. Allowing complete deletion of
something we wished we hadn't said is part of the
character of the halfbakery, so would be nice to keep
around. 72 hours seemed reasonable to allow for coming
back after a weekend, but there could be good reason for a
shorter or longer time period.
When deleting other people's annotations, having a visible
"deleted" placeholder discourages people from abusing the
privilege. But be sure to let the original poster delete
their annotation along with the placeholder immediately if
they choose (and it's younger than 72 hours).