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OK, so can I really not delete a discussion post? Even as an admin?

I delete it and it still displays prominently at the top of the discussion with a line through it. Still is viewable. Still shows up in searches. People can even reply to it, even thought it's "deleted".

Is there any way to really delete it?

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Deleted discussion group posts still show to people on the same subnet as the original poster. This was designed so that spammers or annoying people wouldn't actually know their post was deleted. It works very well to keep discussions on track and positive. The gadfly whose post has been deleted keeps checking back to see what the other users have said, but they magically do the mature thing and don't respond. Soon, the person who posted to the discussion to get a rise out of people (not to help the discussion) loses interest and moves on.

Note that because this is based on the original IP address of the post, it's not cookie-dependent.

If you try and test this behavior from your own network, it'll appear to you that deleted posts keep showing for all users, including anonymous viewers of the discussion, but only if the post came from your network. When you test from your own network, the behavior seems counterintuitive and confusing. But in practice, it works very well to keep discussions among people on different networks civilized and on track.

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My group has FogBugz on an intranet network with most users on a single discussion group on the same subnet. Is there a way to improve upon this behavior for small network teams? – Mike Caron Jun 14 2011 at 18:32
This sort of arrogant design decision is why I don't use Apple products. When you implement dubious features that work for some environments and not others, it would be courteous to implement SOME way that other kinds of environments can address their needs. As it is, there's simply NO feature, other than SQL, to remove topics and posts without suffering from this subnet "feature". That's a Bad Thing, which causes the product to Not Work in many environments, at all. – denis bider Apr 27 2012 at 18:56

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