Soft delete for disapproved posts.

[snehlata08]

Currently the posts/topics which are disapproved gets deleted straight away from the database. I request a feature where the posts are not deleted for certain days(for eg. 15 days) so that they can be reviewed and re-posted. @ellmetha

[rg2609]

• Post submissions will enter a review queue and be accepted or rejected by the Forum admins within x days. The # of days can be configurable or hard-coded.

• Rejections will be accompanied by feedback. Submissions do not appear until they are approved.

[rg2609]

@ellmetha, Most required feature, we also want this feature to be added

[BoPeng]

I have implemented this, but for a private project. Essentially, what we did was

1. Overriding the field approved to a tri-status field

   approved = models.BooleanField(
       null=True, default=None, db_index=True, verbose_name='Approved')

   by extending Topic and Post.

2. Change the model and view querysets by adding the logics such as exclude(approved=False)and

       if self.request.user.is_authenticated and not self.request.user.is_staff:
           cond = Q(approved=False) & ~Q(poster=self.request.user)
       else:
           cond = Q(approved=False)
       return Post.objects.exclude(cond)

   so that the deleted posts will still be seen by their own authors.

3. Then we changed the delete logic to something like

   def delete(self, *args, **kwargs):
   if self.approved is False:
       super().delete(*args, **kwargs)
   else:
       self.approved = False
       self.save(update_fields=['approved'])

4. In the templates, the approved=None, approved=True, and approved=False posts are displayed differently. Right now we make all None and True posts public, and False only visible to their posters.

I am sure that I am allowed to make the relevant changes public but I am not sure if @ellmetha welcome such a PR. I can image a flag is needed (TRI_STATE_APPROVAL_STATUS?) to keep backward compatibility.