Deleting the text of an entry should not delete the entry or should warn first

[torachan]

Title:
Deleting the text of an entry should not delete the entry or should warn first

Area:
Entries

Summary:
Deleting the text of an entry should either not cause the entry to be deleted, or if it does, it should warn before deleting.

Description:
Back in the day, the only way to delete an LJ entry was to delete the text and then save the entry. Now, of course, on both LJ and DW, there is an actual delete button. Using the delete button gets you a "do you really want to delete?" type message before it deletes the entry. However, the old way of deleting still exists, and worse, it doesn't ask you if you really want to delete, it just does it.

There are many reasons why someone might delete the text without wanting to delete the entry. They might want to just keep the title and comments but no longer have the text of the entry there, or they might be testing something. (The case that prompted this post was someone getting weird whitespace issues and trying to see if they could get rid of it by saving a blank entry and then repasting in the text, but when they saved the blank entry, the entire post was deleted without warning.)

Now that a delete button exists, there's not really a good reason why deleting the text should delete the entry. If someone wants to delete an entry, there's a much more intuitive way of doing so: just click the delete button! So my suggestion is that if you delete the text, it should not delete the entry.

However, if that's not possible, at the very least there should be a warning before deletion just like there is with using the delete button. Users new to DW/LJ may not even know about the old way of deleting, and even long-time users may have forgotten it or assumed it was changed with the implementation of the delete button. There should always be a warning before something is deleted.

Poll #11752 Deleting the text of an entry should not delete the entry or should warn first

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 80

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
56 (70.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
19 (23.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
5 (6.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)