On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 17:55:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
FWIW I like to post and just see it there. On the rare
occasions I make a mistake that could make my post
misunderstood I cancel the message within seconds and repost it
with the fix. (BTW would be nice to have the ability to cancel
a message from the Web interface.) If we allow post editing we
should allow viewing the history. Generally it's not something
I've been missing. -- Andrei
NNTP cancellation is something I've thought about. It has issues:
1. There is no authentication and restrictions on what you can
cancel. The forum would need to implement its own (e.g. by
inserting a digest into a header that can only be validated
through a secret cookie). I'm also worried that by exposing this
feature, I'll bring more attention to its existence, which will
increase the likelihood of its abuse - and even detecting the
abuse may not be easy.
2. It does not propagate. If an NNTP client will cancel a
message, it will still be visible on the forum. DFeed needs to
request the full message list from the server to know which
messages are gone (it does this every few days or so). And, of
course, mailing list users will get it anyway, and it will also
be stored on the mailing list archives browsable from the web.
