This blog is short and simple, and just answers the question "how do we delete things". The answer is we don't. Mod DB makes use of non-destructive deleting. Put simply, once something is on the site it is never truly deleted from our database.
The Mod DB Deleting MachineIt's all to make our lives easier. At one point our delete buttons did exactly as you'd expect and completely eradicated stuff from the database with no hope of retrieval short of going and digging around the backups, something nobody on the admin team wants to waste time doing since it's more of a pain to re-integrate the old content with the site than it is to just recreate it.
We then noticed that sometimes there were idiots within the community who maliciously deleted content from mods they were leaving (or more often were kicked out of), or mod leaders who deleted negative comments from their mods purely to help their PR image. We even had some moderators go on a power trip at one point and delete threads or content that wasn't supposed to be, and even for the pure of heart in both the community and the staff there's always the dreaded "oh dammit, I didn't mean to press that button!" which often leads to someone's hard-created content vanishing in a puff of digital smoke. So we started making the delete button only soft-delete things, mark them as 'deleted' in the database but still leave them intact so they could be retrieved later if we needed to.
v2 was the first version to implement the beginnings of this with an undelete feature for forum threads. v3 improved by making mods undeleteable, and now v4 has pretty much everything completely undeleteable even by high level staff without resorting to going and prodding the database manually (which nobody wants to do because the gerbils turning the wheels tend to bite). If something is 'deleted' we can always get it back again.
Told you it was simple.
Realistically the only way it could/should be done for a community site such as Mod DB