First of all, thank you for all the great work in PieFed (I’m a huge fan of the Communities features), and the beautiful way of including user’s input in its development.

About the 2 questions in relation to the comment section, I searched in this community if it was a topic already discussed, but I didn’t find something in the search results. I’m sorry if I missed it, and please point me to the relevant post/discussion.

  • I noticed that when I want to delete a comment I have the option to check a box saying

Also delete replies to this comment

I am not sure why this feature is available. Maybe someone writes a lazy comment and then gets a thoughtful and well researched reply, and maybe a great conversation evolves after. If one wants to delete their comment, this is fine, but having the possibility of deleting everybody else’s is something I have to admit I don’t understand.

  • If I got this right, when the first comment of a conversation is highly downvoted, all the conversation that follows disappears. In practice, this means that everybody else’s input is in a way erased, since at somr point it is not visible. I believe a bad initial comment that gets a thoughtful reply can be a great conversation starter with many participants. So I don’t understand this approach neither.

If I may say so, the way I see things so far, these 2 features seem to discourage meaningful interactions in the comment section of PieFed, in the sense that why put any effort in repplying since it might go away. Of course maybe I misunderstood something. Not only that, there could also be many things that I don’t get which could make me see things differently, and this is why I thought of asking here.

In any case, thank you very much for taking the time to read all the above, and again thank you for all the work you put in PieFed.

Edit: super briefly the answers to my questions are below. For details see comment section.

  • For question 1 the answer is that the check box works only for admins and mods

  • For question 2 the answer is in Settings > Blocks & Filters > “Reply hide threshold”

  • Rimu@piefed.socialMEnglish
    14·
    3 months ago

    I’ll wait to see what people want but I probably intended the ‘delete child comments’ feature to be for moderators only. For cleaning up threads that have gone off on a bad tangent.

    • Skavau@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      I’ve actually used it, so it’s very useful to just clean up an angry back and forth. But it should be mods only.

      Maybe a user could have “delete all my comments in this chain”.

    • wjs018@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, I remember the discussion about this feature and it was only intended for mods. Seems like a permissions check isn’t working right.

    • wakest@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Since comments can and will do from other servers that you dont control we should probably change the wording to something like delete local representation of comments from view or something along those lines.

          • Rimu@piefed.socialMEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            I don’t know if Mastodon would honor the delete request (probably not?) but if your instance was PieFed or Lemmy then yes. I moderate piefed_meta and other threadiverse instances know that.

  • Blaze (he/him)@lemmy.zip
    4·
    3 months ago

    About your first point, it’s a bit similar to how posters on Lemmy and Piefed can delete their post, even if it has meaningful comments.

    It happens from time to time and is frustrating, there’s nothing preventing it

  • wjs018@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    Alright, I did some testing, and this feature is not quite working as intended. Here are the results of my testing:

    • A normal user (non-mod or admin) checks this box:

      • The user’s comment will be deleted, but…
      • it will not delete the comments of other users
      • The normal user’s other comments down the chain will also be deleted.

    • A mod or admin checks this box:

      • All the comments in the chain are deleted as expected
  • solo@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Hi again, and thank you for taking the time with this post. I was wondering about the 2nd question in this post. It seems to me it wasn’t mentionned in the comments? Copy-pasting it here to make things easier.

    • If I got this right, when the first comment of a conversation is highly downvoted, all the conversation that follows disappears. In practice, this means that everybody else’s input is in a way erased, since at somr point it is not visible. I believe a bad initial comment that gets a thoughtful reply can be a great conversation starter with many participants. So I don’t understand this approach neither.

    The way it is for lemmy seems fine to me. Everything is visible. Why make the whole thread disapear in PieFed?

    Edit: I just noticed that the flair solved was added. Should I perhaps make a separate post for the 2nd point?

    • wjs018@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      A moderator deleting a chain of comments shouldn’t really be simply due to downvotes. It can be a useful tool when you have a huge chain of comments with people going wildly off topic and getting nasty with one another. I have only had to use it once before when a comment chain between two individuals devolved into personal attacks against one another.

      After some testing, I found that the checkbox you are referring to does not actually delete all replies in a chain when it is checked by a non-moderator. Instead, it only deletes all the replies made by you in the chain. I submitted a fix to change the wording for this checkbox in the next version of piefed so that it clarifies this behavior.

      • solo@piefed.socialOPEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        I have the impression there is some sort of confusion, most probably I need to explain things better.

        In this post I had 2 questions, you reply in relation to the 1st one. To my understanding this one was solved. I am also wondering about the 2nd one.

        Here is an example about the 2nd one: In the following post see the thread starting by the comment of user gedaliyah. Notice it is present in lemmy, but not present in PieFed. At least for me?

        • wjs018@piefed.socialEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          Ah, yeah…it’s there, it is just sitting at a score of -135, so it is probably being hidden by your filters. On the Blocks & Filters page of your user settings, there is a threshold at which comments and posts are hidden automatically. Feel free to adjust this to whatever you desire. In this case, it would need to be something less than -135.

          • solo@piefed.socialOPEnglish
            3·
            3 months ago

            Thank you so much!! This is so exiting!!! PieFed and all of you are the very best <3