Hello everybody,

if I may make a suggestion: I agree with both positions on this:

a) A message deletion/destruction feature requested on the senders side
for the receiving side is not possible to implement reliably in an open
protocol/environment where the receiving client just can ignore that
request.
Users can therefore be mislead and wonder why that feature does not work
as expected.

b) As being said a general demand still exists for such a feature. On
the one hand we just have users who will compare XMPP programs with
other solutions and will probably always keep asking for this. On the
other hand there are certain environments where the users really have a
use (and perhaps need) for such a feature, see Brian Cully's answer for
example.

So why not try to accommodate both realitys and define a feature which
is called "Invalidation of Messages" or similar instead of "Destructible
Messages". The goal of this feature should be to mark messages in a way,
that the client somehow can mark the message as "not being relevant
anymore" or something like that. So it could still be displayed but
grayed out for example telling the receiver that the message can be ignored.
Additionally there could then be added an attribute "deletionrequest"
which can be set for clients which really want to have destructible
messages like Signal does.

This is of course not perfect either, because such a request can be
ignored as well, but I think it would be a good compromise between the
two extremes not defining such a feature at all (-> there will be
unstandardized implementations) and defining it specificly as
destructive messages feature (-> users are mislead). The term
"invalidation" does not implicate that directly.


Regards,
Stefan Hamacher
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