Deleting Comments Should Delete Notifications Of Those Comments

This is annoying:

Being sent a link to a comment it will turn out we won’t be allowed to see is a waste of our time. We shouldn’t have a notification since there’s no comment there. It should either take that little number away or let us see what it was.

@reversalmushroom
This is a much larger feature request than you likely imagine.

Notifications now just track whether there was any comment since last you cleared notifications on an image. Now the system would have to take into consideration the status of every comment, or do a check on every notification to see if it’s still relevant, for every notification for every user.

And deleted comments will never be shown; there’s a reason they’re deleted; particularly the #6 ones tend to lead to malware sites, and otherwise viewing deleted comments defeats the purpose of deleting them for all sorts of reasons.

@The Smiling Pony
Can you make deleting a comment send an “anti-notification”? As in, it sends a -1 to the number next to the bell. If you can make it send a +1, then why not also a -1?

Also, I thought the staff could still look up deleted comments, and if they can, they can paste that functionality into the comment section for the rest of us. You say it defeats the purpose, but the people whose upload got commented on want to know what it said.

@reversalmushroom
You have to account for more than one person having commented; you wouldn’t want to delete a notification just because the last person out of multiple comments had their comment deleted.

Staff can look up deleted comments for the purpose of being able to gain context on what’s going on, not because it’s fun or they’re curious. I’m sure people would be curious about why some comment got deleted, but the site isn’t going to have a little “reveal deleted comment” that just shows doxxing info, a link to a malware site, a massive tirade about x-racial group, hotlinked CP, or just general trollshit. The overwhelming majority of deleted comments have nothing to do with the image and at best are some inane slur-ridden tirade against some other poster reeing about not liking their waifu on some DeviantArt journal.

@reversalmushroom
Just focusing on the idea of making it so you can see what people said that we deleted …

Let’s assume the worse. Let’s assume the recent deleted comments on one of your uploads directly targeted you - or personally attacked the extremely popular and frequently harassed artist whose work you uploaded. Why would we allow that kind of personal attack to stand? If someone’s being an asshole, then we don’t want them on the site. And we don’t want to give them a soapbox or creating drama about other users of the site.

Alternatively, let’s assume the best. It was just someone using that image to complain about a site-wide issue that has nothing to do with that image. So it’s not about you, it’s not about the artist. It’s just completely off topic. Or maybe it’s just the list of characters from a 1970’s movie that sometimes get spammed for no reason. Or an advertisement for some industrial supply store in Afghanistan that doesn’t ship more than 20 miles. Why would you want those kinds of off topic comments to survive? Why would you want spammers or people incapable of even following the simplest rules to be allowed to shit up fanart comments?

@The Smiling Pony
Sorry, didn’t mean to cross-post. But since I’m working with this person already on something else I thought I would weigh in.

Is the notification generated when the comment is posted, or when the subscribed user accesses the site?

If the latter, have the function of deleting a comment also refresh the time-of-most-recent-comment metadata appropriately - to be that of the most recent non-deleted comment - so when the user next logs in, notification generation is working based on useful data.

If the former, additionally have the process of deleting a comment remove that image from notifications for all subscribed users, and then regenerate that image’s notifications for all subscribed users based on the now-updated most-recent-comment timestamp.

Hard to imagine this set of operations would tax the server, considering it already updates this same information in the same amounts every time a comment is posted, and comments are posted an order of magnitude more often than comments are deleted.

By the way, I also feel the same way about the forums, wishing that deleting the most recent comment(s) from a thread would “un-bump” it, ie. return it to the position the thread would be based on the most recent non-deleted post.