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    if we wanted to get really fancy... Add some sort of "tap on the shoulder" feature that'd give the author a heads-up that they'd just made a blunder and gave 'em the opportunity to delete it. Escalates to a flag if not addressed in [time]. Commented May 3, 2018 at 2:46
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    The problem with unlimited deletion is rage-quits and straight-up hiding of abuse (think: those creeps who set up chat rooms for solicitation). There's no "undelete" for chat messages; that'd have to be added, or a rate-limit for deletion so severe as to make the feature of limited use. Commented May 3, 2018 at 2:50
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    Are chat abuses more common than comment abuses? (We can't undelete those comments, either.) I wouldn't have a problem with a limit per day on deletions; if somebody is doing this more than a handful of times, he probably needs to rethink his chat use anyway. Yes, that would mean more tooling. What can we do that's better than "permanent after two minutes" without enabling the abuse you're worried about? I like your "tap on the shoulder" idea; it's kind of like the suggestion to show flags to the author first. (I know that's been suggested for comments; don't know about chat.) Commented May 3, 2018 at 2:55
  • Comment threads tend to be a lot shorter than even brief chat conversations. And... There's a flag that gets raised if you delete too many comments. Neither are common, but chat stands to be potentially more disruptive. For abuse, that unfortunate has been common in the past, complete with using deletion to try & hide - of course, they couldn't hide stuff older than 2 minutes, so it got caught anyway. Commented May 3, 2018 at 2:59
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    ...now that I think about it, chat was waaaay creepier just a few years ago. We're not exactly doing great right now, but at least some of the worst stuff is no longer commonplace. Commented May 3, 2018 at 3:00
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    I did suggest raising an auto-flag if there are too many deletions (as an extra). Maybe that's not as optional as I thought and needs to go with the ability to delete. Or maybe we just need to lengthen the window from 2 minutes to, say, a day (you come back after sleeping on it and realize how inappropriate you were). Maybe log deletions with the chat annotations, for easier auditing? Commented May 3, 2018 at 3:01
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    I think we could probably swing a day window combined with a flag that looks specifically for deletion >= new not-deleted messages over a longer time period (two days to a week). So if you flip out, come back sober & clean up, fine. But if you delete almost everything you post on a regular basis... Bad news! But yeah - the UI for reviewing these would need to be a lot better than what we have now. Commented May 3, 2018 at 3:06
  • @Shog9 if you decide to implement this, then please do a multi-tiered visibility escalation: first the room owners see warnings about potentially problematic deletions (room owners can decide if it's not a problem so as not to bother mods or send it straight to them without delay (or even temporarily suspend user's deletion ability and raise a flag, like kicks)), then moderators of that site the room is tied to, then if it's not dealt by anyone in either of previous steps, escalate it to global mods. And probably don't show it to just all 10k users who obviously can't do anything about it. Commented May 3, 2018 at 14:14
  • Y'know that doesn't really work for the case of a RO who creates a room to harass others, @user13 Commented May 3, 2018 at 14:40
  • I'm not sure what exactly you speak of there, but I'm sure the code may check if the deletions were happening by a room owner, and so the stage of showing the deletions warning to the room owners would be skipped, and straight to local mods, then global. Commented May 3, 2018 at 14:43
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    I'm curious how many user-deleted comments cause a flag @Shog9 because I've never seen that and I found a user doing that frequently without our notice... so either another mod cleared it without saying anything or...? Commented May 3, 2018 at 17:48
  • You can limit the number per day, too. If someone can delete messages but only, say, five per day, that makes killing entire histories very tiresome... but allows the occasional "whoops" message. Using all of them in a day could trigger an alert "we see you're deleting a lot of messages, please flag for moderator assistance if you need help". Commented May 3, 2018 at 17:52
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    The threshold for the flag is pretty high, @Catija; it's a very rare flag even on SO. This touches on why the same technique is bad for chat: the use-case is almost the reverse of for comments. On main, there are only a few scenarios where you don't want folks deleting their comments; comments are never really an end-goal. In chat, messages ARE the goal - so there are really only a few scenarios where you want them removed. Making message deletion easy opens the door to far more unwanted uses than it does wanted ones... And I don't think anyone wants a massive queue of mod-flags in chat. Commented May 3, 2018 at 21:45
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    @Shog9 But we have gotten the occasional "can you delete this" mod flag before and they're usually handled as requested. They're not my favorites but it's at least an option. My main concern about this is that (while rare) some of these users with a habit of deleting comments aren't particularly nice in those comments (and I'm not talking about my own past experience). And I've seen users on chat intentionally deleting their chat messages within 2 minutes to make it difficult to follow their discussion, which was also not great. I don't want entire chat rooms like that. Commented May 3, 2018 at 21:49
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    Even there, it's not like we don't want non-nice comments deleted - we just want to know that someone's being persistently rude in addition to the comments going away, @Catija. In chat, pure offensiveness - while a problem - pales next to the damage that both predatory behavior and vandalism can cause, and both scenarios are exacerbated by the ability to delete messages long after they were posted. Commented May 3, 2018 at 21:54