Request Disable Soft Deletion, Only Allow Hard Deletion

It is good to see hard deletion in the user permissions in the latest version, however I would like to be able to make this the default and disable soft deletions altogether.

What is happening now is that users are reaching their maximum number of photos or albums allowed and "deleting" old ones - except they are only soft deleting them.

They can no longer see the deleted images/albums, nor are they included in their photo/album counts but they cannot add new ones as the old ones actually still exist.

There also doesn't appear to be an easy way to clean these images up or search for them, so they are effectively orphaned and just taking up storage space.

 

It will certainly help, but the reality is that users neither need nor understand "Soft" deletions

 

I guessed it was something that was inherited from Xenforo. Unfortunately, whilst soft deletion makes a lot of sense for moderators it makes little sense to end users.

An alternative would be to have some method of us regularly cleaning up soft deletions, eg via a cron job and actually making the physical deletions at that point.

At the moment, I can't even see how moderators/administrators could even search for and select them for permanent deletion - is there a way?

 

Yes, they can - but can they search for ones that have been soft deleted, or do they have to go through every photo to find them?