Option to Remove "This Entry Has Been Deleted" in Discussions

[snugent]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

  Idea will be open for vote May 5th, 2015 - August 5th, 2015  Learn more about voting...

Originally posted Ren Whitaker in the old community. The idea was:

When an instructor deletes a student post, the following text appears on screen as an artifact - permanently: "This entry has been deleted".

We have been testing our Canvas course over the past couple of months, and then deleting the test discussion entries as we go to clean up the site. As a result, we have now racked up DOZENS of these messages within the Discussion Board. It looks ridiculous!

http://screencast.com/t/zwUsoU9OlPlY

I understand that the message has value initially, but I think we should have the ability to remove it. All we need is a simple delete option.

Thank you.

-Ren Whitaker

It would be nice if this information could be moved to a history page similar to what pages have. Students don't need to see this and the history page would allows instructors to view how many times the student deleted messages in the discussion. Currently if an instructor does testing in a course they have no way to remove all these entries. As Ren stated this clutters up the discussion and looks ridiculous.

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-02-18) 

[banderson]

One complication is deleted posts which have replies. Perhaps they could still have a placeholder, but deleted posts with no replies disappear?

[Renee_Carney]

Panda-Cat: A mythical creature that we dreamed up to catch your attention, make you laugh, and encourage you to keep reading the explanation of our archive process for Feature Ideas

Archive: An archived Feature Idea is not dead forever, but it has been taken out of stage progression.  When Community members submit feature ideas they are reviewed by the Community Team and then put to a vote by the community at large.  If the idea does not receive 100 votes within 3 months it will be archived.  Ideas that reach the 100 vote threshold within the first three months remain open for voting. Find more information about this process at How does the voting process work for feature ideas?

Can archived ideas still become a feature?  Yes.  Some feature ideas that do not receive 100 votes are resubmitted by Community members and find more supporters as people's needs change, rising more quickly to the top.  Oftentimes archived feature ideas are evaluated in groups when we are preparing to refactor a particular tool or feature of Canvas and may still influence product direction.

[asaunders]

When it comes to the student view I have seen concerns about the edited by field when the discussions are not actually managed by the instructor. This can be confusing to students in larger courses that are managed by multiple teachers but only edited by a course designer.

[jonwood]

I am finding this lack of ability to delete the record as an admin of dead discussions pretty silly. Thankfully, I can now bring undeleted discussions to the top of the page by liking all the active discussions but it looks so amateur to have hundreds of deleted, dead discussions. Admins need to be able to delete the record.

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has been developed and is On Canvas Beta How do I access the Canvas beta environment?

For more information, please read through the Canvas Beta Release Notes (2017-02-06) 

[Renee_Carney]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

For more information, please read through the https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-8835 

[Renee_Carney]

Thank you to snugent for submitting this idea, as well as, jonwood for your contributions. Your investment in this idea helped refine a feature which is now part of Canvas!