• Danatronic@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    32
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I learned in SQL class that you never ever hard delete data when there is any alternative. On Facebook and Twitter you get a whole month to change your mind before your account can’t be recovered.

    • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’ve heard of people using Facebook for free image hosting, because even if you delete the photo, if you keep the URL where it was located, it will stay there forever. I’m not sure if this is still the case.

      It was often said that to properly clean up all your reddit data you should edit your posts before you delete them. Likely the edit will change the record in-place in the DB (as keeping a full edit history would be a nightmare) and deleting the post likely just sets a flag.

      • astral_avocado@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’ve wondered about this quite a bit. If I were a fucking asshole like spez and wanted to defeat edit/delete scripts, I would set it so there’s 2 entries, one is the original comment and a second column for an edited value. Everytime there’s an edit update the 2nd one.

        I had the idea to start all my comments with gibberish, and then edit with my actual comment, but that got a little tedious lol.

      • Badland9085@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Depending on how their database schema’s designed, editing might not actually help. Some designs are made to track every change, so edits will just end up being a row in the database, and lookbacks can be super easy. For example, you might just have to ask the database to give you what a comment looked like at a given time.

    • DadHands@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Bruh I logged into my Spotify account and it reactivated the Facebook account I had requested be deleted a more than a year prior

    • Oderus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      AWS is the same. Literally unable to delete an account as you have to wait for 30 days after terminating the account.