The title says it all. If I delete a forum thread, it still gets listed with the name "(Deleted)". Is it possible to make them not show at all in the listing?

Is it possible to make them not show at all in the listing?

No. They only disappear if a superuser completely nukes them from the db, which only very rarely happens.

I am the superuser of the db, is nuking the records in the db a complex and time consuming task? Is it documented somewhere? Does it fall into the category of shunning artifacts?

Does it fall into the category of shunning artifacts?

That's exactly what it entails. You need to find the hashes of every edit of every post in the thread and shun them. Richard recently added a feature to generate the list of hashes: when viewing a thread, administrators (only?) will see an "Artifacts" link at the top of the page which will list them in a format suitable for pasting into the shun page. We very intentionally do not want to make such shunning "overly simple" to do, so shunning of a thread intentionally requires a small amount of "manual labor."

Edit: that feature will nuke a whole thread, though, from top to bottom. There is currently no easy way to fish out all hashes of a branch of a specific thread.

If you are the superuser, then at the top of the forum thread you will have an "Artifact" link on the sub-menu. Click that link and you will go to a page that shows all of the artifacts that comprise the forum thread. Swipe and copy the whole list. Then visit the /shun page and paste the list of hashes into the "Shun" box and press the "Shun" button. Then click the "Rebuild" button at the bottom of the Shun page. This will completely nuke the forum thread - no trace will remain.

Notes:

1. Only the superuser can do this.

2. This is not undoable. Once the artifacts have been shunned, they can not be recovered.

We very intentionally do not want to make such shunning "overly simple" to do

I understand why this might be the case with source code, but never understood why other things like forum threads should be treated with the same extreme level of caution. What’s the argument behind making forum moderation activity subject to this level of friction?

I think it makes sense to reuse the shunning mechanism itself, but that doesn’t mean “auto-shunning” a forum thread shouldn’t be a button click followed by a simple confirmation.

but never understood why other things like forum threads should be treated with the same extreme level of caution. What’s the argument behind making forum moderation activity subject to this level of friction?

Quite simply because it's the architecture/mindset of fossil as a whole. We don't differentiate between subsystems in that regard.

I think it makes sense to reuse the shunning mechanism itself, but that doesn’t mean “auto-shunning” a forum thread shouldn’t be a button click followed by a simple confirmation.

As a rule, we don't condone shunning except when necessary for legal compliance or "extreme cases" of forum moderation. Making it easy to do would definitely come across as being a feature we recommend that people use.

OP here. My main reason for the original question isn't the presence of deleted threads in the database. It's the forum timeline cluttered with "(Deleted)" lines. Perhaps it would make sense to have a forum related repository setting as simple as a checkbox that would make it possible to not display such threads in the timeline?

Perhaps it would make sense to have a forum related repository setting as simple as a checkbox that would make it possible to not display such threads in the timeline?

We can't filter materials based on their content from the timeline, and what makes a post "deleted" is its lack of content. The timeline itself is essentially a cache of an overview of changes. It lacks the context to know, with certainty, that a post was deleted. The only approach we would have for that is filtering out timeline entries based solely on their own text content (as opposed to the corresponding forum posts' content) looking for "(Deleted)" or some such, which is inherently icky and would add a performance hit to the timeline.

We could hypothetically filter deleted top-level posts from the thread list view, where we have more info about them, but that would also mean effectively making it very difficult to reach any of the wonderful responses which were made to the post before it was deleted.

Am i understanding correctly that you're using the timeline to navigate your forum, rather than the /forum page?

No no, I don't mean the general repository timeline. I mean the forum timeline, the /forum page. I'd like to not see the deleted threads still listed as "(Deleted)" there at all. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I mean the forum timeline, the /forum page.

"The problem" is that if we were to do so, it would effectively hide other peoples' posts (any who responded to the deleted post), which would likely annoy folks affected by that.

In practice, there are not enough deletions in the forums (using this one and sqlite's as the basis for comparison) for them to genuinely clutter up the list. Yes, they're unsightly, but they act as gateways to both the pre-deletion responses and the pre-deletion version(s) of the deleted posts, so they are not just dead weight.

"The problem" is that if we were to do so, it would effectively hide other peoples' posts (any who responded to the deleted post), which would likely annoy folks affected by that.

Yes, that is what a repo owner who deletes a thread is generally trying to accomplish. Moderation actions do sometimes annoy the affected users, it’s true.

As a rule, we don't condone shunning except when necessary for legal compliance or "extreme cases" of forum moderation. Making it easy to do would definitely come across as being a feature we recommend that people use.

Deleting a forum post is a basic operation that might be done for any number of reasons in any number of situations. I don't see that it carries any more moral or social or functional implication than does, say, allowing the admin user to change a user’s privileges. If Fossil had decided for reasons of principle not to allow the use of the backspace key in its web UI text fields, it could hardly be more strange. I’m not upset, just mystified.

This involves some manual work, but does exactly what I want. Thank you very much.