I don't know why, but you're making me think of Facebook because of how edited posts are shown with its history of what's been edited. Pretty cool stuff.

Ironically, here in this very forum, I remember a well known and generally well respected moderator who seemed to enjoy stirring things up with antagonistic comments against certain members (sometimes against brand new members), and who would then modify those comments to claim they had never been made.

For a good while nobody really believed this was being done. I didn't believe it until I saw what was happening with my own eyes more than once when I was online to see it. Included was the egregious practice of editing posts of members who had included original quotes of this moderator (who would subsequently ban some of these members).

The funny thing about it was that some regulars who knew what was going on would take screen shots of this moderator's original posts, which would then be subsequently passed around in email. Screen shots of posts that were subsequently deleted by this moderator would also be taken, and passed around.

Some banned members were given a couple of different access points through shared accounts, which I thought was pretty clever given the circumstances.

Suddenly, that moderator was gone. Some previously banned accounts were reinstated. Moderators in general once again showed professionalism. All was well in YaBB land.

Go figure. People on the inside stirring things up instead of outsiders doing it.

The thing is, that wasn't the first time that kind of bad behavior happened, nor was it the last time, either. Thankfully, peer pressure usually comes along to fix what's wrong.

Dandello wrote on Jun 7^th, 2013 at 11:10pm:

I've never seen this as a reason to abrogate the ability of the majority of members who might want to modify or delete their own posts.

Problem members can always be banned for good reason if it comes to that, although peer pressure will often correct such bad behavior.

For those who choose to do it out of a need to keep a record of what's actually gone on, perhaps as part of the peer pressure process, members can always use the quote feature.

Bottom line: User friendly freedom of speech is pretty much always the best way to operate a forum.

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xnoddyx wrote on Jun 7^th, 2013 at 11:32pm:

Aside from any legal reasons to allow people to control their own speech, it's the morally correct thing to do.

Our forum hasn't had too many problems with bad behavior even though it does happen from time to time. Again, generally speaking, peer pressure corrects, or at least mitigates the bad behavior.

I suppose at some point if I ever feel compelled to be more dictatorial in the way I moderate our forum, I might choose to simply move questionable posts into a public board that is clearly marked as such. That way, people can choose to participate by reading or adding posts themselves, or they can simply use the rest of the forum in an otherwise user friendly fashion to honor the forum's intended purpose.

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In practice: Each one of us admin can pretty much operate our respective forums any way we wish. We have that freedom just as members have the freedom to leave if they feel any given admin is too oppressive to tolerate. Any member can also leave if an admin operates their forum in a free-for-all manner (such as allowing spammers to invade, or allowing hate speech, etc.).

Each of our forums will be as popular or as unpopular as we are in the way that we administer them. That's just common sense.

On one of my boards I had a couple nasty people who would post things when they knew other people were on just to rile people up. Then they'd go back and delete the post or edit it so it was innocuous just so they could scream about how these other people were misquoting them or out to get them or the quote was taken out of context... (you know the drill  ).

Funny how all that stopped when I disallowed them the ability to remove their posts or modify them.  

Edited:

Interesting issue. I've had post deletion turned off on my boards for so long I hadn't noticed that individual posts didn't end up in the recycle bin. 

Setting the time limit to 0 does disable it - but they can always go back and modify the post into non-existence any way. I mean, if the poster wants it gone, they'll get it gone one way or another. 

The member isn't part of the staff but all that appears in the recycle bin in any full topics which are deleted rather than any individual posts. We have the time limit set but sadly it was deleted within the time limit.

Hi
I am currently running a Yabb 2.5.2 forum and was wondering whether there is a way to recover individual posts which have been deleted by members of the forum.