I cannot delete a post from the Awaiting Approval queue

[Tis_Bearself]

I just tried to respond to a thread and had my post go to an “Awaiting Approval” queue. I imagine this happened because I referenced, from a theoretical viewpoint, the concept of suicide, and the words likely triggered the approval queue although I am not suicidal and the post was not expressing a suicidal ideation.

The post now shows up at the bottom of the thread with “Awaiting Approval” and there is a “delete” button presumably for me to trash the post. There is no edit button for me to edit the language that presumably triggered the approval queue. So my first impulse was to Delete the post and make a new post that expressed the same thing in language that hopefully wouldn’t trigger the approval queue, as it’s also been my experience in the past that posts sitting in the queue usually never get approved and just sit there forever.

Problem: When I hit the “Delete” button, I get a message that says “You are not permitted to view the requested resource.”
??? what’s the point of having a delete button for this if it doesn’t work?

 

[Jon_Sorensen]

Good question. I will ask about it and get back to you.

 

[Web_Admin]

It looks like this issue was resolved?

I think this is the intended behavior of the delete button given the context. It looks like the post was triggered for review, as you mentioned.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

The moderator conversed with me and deleted the post himself, so this instance is resolved.

However, my question is about the orange button Delete feature that appears to be for the user. My question is not about this particular post, nor about the moderator’s ability to delete posts. I know moderators can delete stuff.

Let’s step through this again:

1. I made a post that triggered “Awaiting Approval”.
2. The post while in the queue showed to me with a large orange “Delete” button that indicated to me I could just delete the post myself without moderator intervention. There was no edit button or other control I could use. The orange Delete button seems to be a new feature because in the past when this would happen (because someone had a word like “Hell” or the nickname for Richard in their post, usually) there was no big orange Delete button and you couldn’t even see the post in the queue.
3. Thinking I would just delete the problem post myself, thus sparing the moderator the trouble, I clicked the large orange “Delete” button repeatedly, only to get each time, an error message saying “You are not allowed to view the requested resource.”

Hence my question: In this situation, where the user might wish to just delete the problem post himself because he knows what the problem is and does not need to wait for the moderator, etc. , why doesn’t the big orange Delete button work for the user? Why does it provide an error message rather than simply allowing the user to delete the post?

You may obviously need to re-create this yourself in a sandbox since the moderator came along, spoke with me, and deleted the post from the queue, which was fine with me as I’d already made a replacement post and had been trying to delete the problem post myself 5 times already.

 

[Web_Admin]

Why does it provide an error message rather than simply allowing the user to delete the post?

Because the potential bad action (regardless if it proves to be a false-positive) has been deemed worthy of review and we would not want the user to be able to alter it. It could be argued that still showing a delete button when it can’t be acted on isn’t good for User eXperience, so thank you for bringing this to our attention. But this function is otherwise the intended behavior.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

OK, I understand. Please consider just removing the Delete button if it’s not going to be functional for the user, or else I guarantee other users will be confused also when their button doesn’t work.

Of course we should all try to avoid posting things that trigger the approval queue, but since the criteria often seems to shift over time and there isn’t a clear list visible to the users of what triggers it, it’s kind of a “learn by doing” situation.