@[email protected]’s comments were deleted in a thread I was just looking at, and I went onto their profile and it also appears to have been deleted? Anyone have any knowledge about them? It’s sad if we’ve lost such a long-time excellent member of this community.
When banning a user we’re presented with a tickbox option to remove all posts/comments from them. Likely the admin did this rather than delve into the DB.
There’s also purge. It’s a super-remove that will go through the database and delete every record the user ever existed. I use it sparingly, since the record of purging a user doesn’t even appear in the modlog (no instance admin would ever abuse this power, right?). Can’t log a purge because that user never existed. Even regular-level spam bots don’t get the purge treatment.
I can purge comments, also. I’ve even done it once for a mod. I forget the circumstances of how we reached that point, something about a ban not removing content properly? It was probably hate-related in some form.
Edit: Just tracked that incident down. It was 9 months ago and the mod was… unionagainstdhmo! 😀
The situation was that someone had posted a racist comment that he’d performed a normal remove on. On the web, the comment was gone - but the mobile API was still showing it. That bug has since gone, but yeah it was a thing for a long time where comments removed still showed on the mobile apps.
@lodion I was already dropped as a user, I think he said he had to reinstate me to ban me.
The way he explained it, it was unusual behaviour and more of a “bug”.