Wed Oct 21 2020 - ...
Commenters Can Now Remove Their Comments
! This Article Contains Technical Jargon
What's New
As recently announced - comments left with FastComments can now be edited - whether you are logged in or not.
As a follow up, the ability to delete your comments has been released. Understandably, same as editing comments, has been one of our most requested features, and we're happy to reach this milestone with our user base.
How it Works
Comment removal works the same way as editing - logged in users can always edit and delete their comments. For anonymous commenters, our servers provide a temporary 24-hour window for them to edit or delete their comment after commenting as long as they don't close their browser. For example this means an anonymous commenter can comment, and then edit their comment to fix any typos, or delete it, without ever logging in!
If the anonymous commenter closes their browser, they won't be able to edit or delete their comment unless they click the magic link sent to their email.
For additional security, the temporary edit key will be invalidated on any attempt to guess the key incorrectly.
Why Now, after so long?
The rational for this is the same for why editing took so long to be released. We wanted to ensure this didn't decrease the performance of FastComments and wanted to ensure that it worked properly with our live commenting features. Also, we wanted the feature to accommodate our customers' most common use case - anonymous commenting.
Deleting Live Comments
Just like commenting and voting - deleting happens live. If two users are on the same page, and a user deletes their comment the other user will see it be removed.
Enabling Comment Removal
We've finished rolling out comment editing and deleting by default for all of our customers. Currently, it cannot be turned off.
Third Party Integrations
Deleting a comment will cause the event to propagate to any integrations you have - like WordPress. If you use our WordPress plugin, then adding a comment updates your WordPress installation in the background so you retain a copy of your data. If you remove comments, we follow the same logic and remove it from your WordPress installation. This applies to other integrations, not just WordPress.
In Conclusion
We know this feature has been long awaited by some. Like all major releases, we're glad that we could take the time to optimize, test, and properly release this feature.
Cheers!