Add a 'This journal entry has been deleted by the owner' 404 page

[green_knight]

Title:
Add a 'This journal entry has been deleted by the owner' 404 page

Area:
error messages

Summary:
If the reason a page cannot be found is that the owner has deleted the entry it was pointed at, say so on the error page.

Description:
I just looked through my tabs to find a generic 404 error from DW. In this case, I could work out that the error was due to the entry I had just spotted and wanted to comment on, and could confirm that it no longer exists in the journal in question.

Usually, I leave my browser running for days; I might have large numbers of tabs open, and I get to DW posts in a number of ways (reading list, links from friends, links people have twittered and shortened). If I'd come back tomorrow to find that tab, I would not have known whether *I'd* made a mistake entering the URL, whether someone else gave me an invalid URL, or whether the page used to exist and no longer does.

Poll #3742 Add a 'This journal entry has been deleted by the owner' 404 page

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 46

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
24 (52.2%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
11 (23.9%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
4 (8.7%)

(I have no opinion)
7 (15.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

But would the system then somehow keep track of what I've deleted forever? I do not like that much.

[matgb]

It basically already does (and publicly as well, pretty much), as each entry has a URK of post number*256+random (1-256), so if there's a gap in numbers you can see an entry is deleted (I did, once, backtrack my own post numbers on LJ to find a deleted one, I don't recall why).

IIRC, even if you delete, that post number multiplier still goes up.

[zvi]

Er, when you say, "what I've deleted" what do you mean? I don't think the system keeping track of the fact that there existed an entry, and it had this id in the system, but now the id has been unaffixed from any content is particularly awful or privacy infringing.

I don't think that deleted entry content is kept forever, although I haven't any idea how often things are flushed from cache, actually. But I don't think that this proposal would entail keeping the details (datetime, entry text, icon, settings, etc.) around forever, if I understand what it is proposing.

[green_knight]

Displaying details of the post would be an invasion of privacy - if the owner has deleted it, you should not be able to tell anything about it, but all I want is 'there used to be an entry here' (which says 'this was a valid URL') as opposed to 'this URL is invalid'.

[matgb]

My with change:
All 404s on a specific journal should have a clear link to the frontpage (recent entries) of the journal itself, regardless of why there 404 is happening.

If styling is on for post pages, styling should also be on for 404s, if someone follows a duff link to my journal (recently someone shortened a link using bit.ly, but had put a . after html, so it didn't work), they know they're on my journal, and get a link to my journal.

And yes, we already have a 'you can't read this, protected' warning, so a 'this entry is deleted' warning is fine by me.

[susanreads]

+1

[turlough]

+1

[damned_colonial]

+1

[kyrielle]

+1

[msilverstar]

+1

[green_knight]

I likes.

[erika]

+1

[goodbyebird]

+1

[sally_maria]

Yes - that would be brilliant.

[briarwood]

It's a small thing, perhaps, but there's a difference between this entry has been deleted by the owner and this entry has been deleted.

It's not just the 'owner' who can delete entries: community posts can be deleted by mods, and there are rare TOS issues too, where a post may be deleted by site admins.

I just feel that adding 'by the owner' is maybe too much information. But a 404 message that tells you you had a valid URL, it's just gone now - yes, great idea.

[denise]

Just to clarify, we don't ever delete posts. If there's a ToS issue, we'd email the author and require them to delete it, not delete it ourselves.

[briarwood]

I appreciate that :) I really, really do.

Still, there could be (very unlikely) hypothetical circumstances in which you would delete it. Say if the journal owner couldn't be reached.

And it doesn't change my point re. communities: it's not only the original poster who can delete posts.

[denise]

Nope -- if the original poster couldn't be reached and it had to be removed, we'd suspend that single post, not delete it. (Suspending the post means that it's still there, it just isn't visible.)

(I know, I know, it's semantics, but it makes my skin crawl to have anyone say that we might ever delete posts! Never, ever, ever, ever, ever.)

[erika]

I find this totally awesome.