Can’t delete a Topic I created

STEPS:
1). Make a new topic
2). Realize you made a repost
3). Try to delete post out of embarrassment

RESULTS:
Don't know how. Is flagging for moderation the only way?

You need more Trust.

Hmm... Any reason people need trust to delete their OWN posts? What sort of abuse are you trying to prevent here?

Is "Trust" some kind of measured metric in this case, like "likes" or "bit coins"?

From my profile, I see that I have "Trust Level:basic user" does that mean its immutable except by mods or if I get enough likes/posts will I someday flip over to "Trust Level:power user"?

LOL if @codinghorror is also Trust Level: basic user, that does not bode well for me.

It can come in handy when someone decides to delete their posts that have already been indexed by google and is ranked highly. I agree that someone should be able to delete their own posts but within a timeframe like 1 min.

Trust increases when you post or start a new topic, like karma on stackoverflow. Probably increases for other stuff too, but there's no set list.

I would suggest 2-5 minutes. 1 is actually really small when you think about it.

For now, flagging is the only way, but see:

http://meta.discourse.org/t/delete-your-own-reply/511

Deleting a topic is a bit more sensitive than deleting a post.

For now, deleting a post simply inserts

(removed by author)

as an edit revision to the post.

This is awkward for a topic since if the topic doesn't exist, nobody knows what they should be replying to, exactly.. and that means it might be safe to truly delete the topic if there are no replies, however, this is also a great way to grief the forum, by posting and then self-deleting a bunch of topics that magically disappear before anyone can complain about them...

So it's tricky.

What do you mean by "grief the forum"? It seems to me that more "grief" is caused by creating a bunch of empty posts or topics that just say "removed" than by allowing someone to completely remove something that is incorrect, mistaken, outdated or otherwise regretted.

Well trolls come in many flavours, keeping these stubs around helps keep everyone in check. If you see a lot of stubs from Johnny, well you can flag him.

Keep in mind, deleting is a huge outlier. For example, out of my 610 posts here I deleted exactly 0.

We are not seeing any real world problems with our current design so I see not point in "fixing" it.

It's perfectly fine to flag a topic for moderator attention with a comment, if you truly need the topic deleted. That should cover most cases without any risk of abuse.

For example, if I delete my topic with 5 replies, what happens to those 5 replies? Did I have the right to remove those? Is it cool to have a topic that says (deleted) with 5 replies to.. nothingness? Wouldn't that be annoying for readers, replyers, pretty much everyone that encountered the topic?

Lots of ways self-deletion of topics can go wrong.

I'm not a regular around here, but I have found this issue frustrating as well.

While yes, it can go both ways of topic posting and deletion abuse, It is really inconvenient to not be able to delete your own topic occasionally.

Maybe something can be done to limit abuse? Something that can, within reason, be done without requiring the attention, therefore creating additional work for moderators?

Surely a solution can be created that would be a net benefit here?

+1 for the idea of being able to delete one's own posts within a short time of being created and as long as nobody else has replied. I'm doing lots of test posts on our new Discourse system and have to keep asking the moderator to remove. And I don't want to be a moderator as I'm using the system from a normal user's point of view.

One perfectly valid reason is to decide fusing the content of two posts according to a common theme and to avoid seeming spam.

So a second post becomes redundant.

I could definitely see deleting one's own post with the following criteria as being a reasonable option:

• Within ninja edit window (as defined in site settings)
• No replies
• No likes
• No flags (this could be trickier, as flags aren't visible to users).

I just found this thread via a google search on how to delete a post I accidentally made on a different forum.

In this case, as soon as I hit “send” I realized I didn’t want to post at all on this account (I was logged in via a company account in another forum vs my own account).

A grace period (say 60-120 seconds) where you can freely delete your post when you realize you just made a mistake would be very helpful for these situations.

You can delete posts, this topic is about deleting topics.

I meant topic. I apologize for my lack of pedantry.