For admin it's impossible hide the title of topic and if the topic is deleted the title is always visible. It's a problem because vandal can use the title for defamatory content and we can't hide it. You can check my test in Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:ValterVB&action=history (around the 07:56, 16 apr 2017) I tried to hide and delete the topic but the title is always visible.
See also:
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T170360 Moderation and protection feature parity in Flow (tracking) | |||
| Open | None | T163061 Flow: It's impossible hide/delete the title of topic |
This is the same on wikitext talk pages, right? If you delete a "topic" (section), the name of that section will still be visible in the history, in the diffs of those edits and usually in their edit summaries too. If there is defamatory or otherwise terrible content in these section names, an oversighter can suppress the relevant edits. This is also possible in Flow, where an oversighter can suppress topics with defamatory content in their titles.
That said, a lot of people do seem to expect topic deletion to work like page deletion (where the name is not visible in the history, though it's still visible on Special:Log/delete) as opposed to section deletion (where the title and full contents are still in the history), so we should look into that. Right now, topic deletion is somewhere in between those two (the title is still visible, but the content is not).
Sorry for the terminology confusion. The Flow UI uses "oversight", but it works a bit more like RevDel, and I think the rights needed for it are revdel-style rights. If not, that's something we should fix.
Sorry, that's also wrong. The Flow UI uses "suppress".
It looks like Wikidata gives the deleterevision right to both admins and oversighters, but the flow-suppress right only to oversighters. I think that might be because the latter is more expansive than the former, so we may have to fix that in Flow and provide a right that only lets you suppress things (and not view suppressed things), so that that right could be given to admins.
The Topic pages look deleted without admin rights but they look alive when you have admin rights. While it at least provides screen between potentially not sharable information and the outside world it is counter-intuitive that unlike revision delete sysops see it right away rather than after clicking two times. Flow should either act as other pages do or be gone, IMHO.
Is there any workaround available right now? This has been abused on mediawiki.org recently.
The Growth-Team discussed this and will keep an eye on it but we can not take this work on at this moment because we have planned feature work to do. I am adding members of the Editing-team as well as a result of their future work with Talk pages.
Bump.
Recap: While admins can delete (hide) the revision text and summary of any edit, the title of a topic cannot be hidden. Thus, insulting content in the history and logs is visible for ever.
I believe that some trolls took notice of this and are posting their insults in the title of the topic...
@geraki: See previous comment. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker and https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Tutorial if you are interested in providing code to fix this.