I have been seeing members copy and paste the “post withdrawn by author…” message into their posts to make it look like the post was deleted. I think it was written somewhere on the forum that members should flag their posts to actually have them hidden by the Leads?
As a member, how would I handle posts like these?
Flag? Message?
I would think that just messaging them and asking them to flag their own post for deletion would be sufficient, but flagging it yourself (using “Something Else” and describing that the author just copy-pasted the withdrawl message into their post) would probably be much faster.
They aren’t actually being edited, in-fact if you click on the three dots next to your ‘Reply,’ you can mark your post for deletion.
Edit: Oh i see what you mean. Best case, just flag the post as other and comment that the author’s post was not properly removed.
If they are replies just send the author a message explaining what they did wrong + flag it with Something Else for removal.
If they are the first post in a thread, please flag it with Something Else asking for the original content to be restored. We don’t do thread deletions like that.
I know for topics we report it as Something Else and mention we would like it deleted, but we are to do this with replies also?
There are rare cases where new members don’t know how to delete replies, so they just paste the message(post withdrawn by author…) inside their reply.
Only for categories where that makes sense, yes. (Basically only Public Collaboration) For all other categories we do not allow you to delete the threads and Developer Engagement will not lock/unlist the thread either, because on a forum you are not only posting for yourself but also for the current/future community.
Yes, you can flag replies that detract from the forum. (such as not properly removing them but instead editing the content with the delete message, which means it clutters the thread since they are not actually removed)
And what about people who overwrite their topics if they cannot delete it?
Take for example a very long thread and turn after years, the owner decides to overwrite it all with a single “-” or “.” or “…” or simply “deleted/removed/redacted/censored by author”… In these cases, what do we do?
To answer your question, I’m pretty sure no matter how old or long the post is, the same treatment is given. The nature of the action is what matters.
If this is supposed to be automatic it clearly isn’t working correctly at the moment 
Maybe this is why we’re seeing these posts and assuming they have been manually edited by the author?
You’re going off of posted date, not edit date. My post wasn’t removed two hours ago, that’s when it was posted. It’s gone now.
