Redaction alternative

[dbkr]

The intention of the redact feature is (I think) for emergency situations where you really want a message stripped from the record as much as is possible (eg. you accidentally pasted a password or something equally revealing) but it gets fairly widespread use just to change your mind about sending a message. This is annoying and confusing for people reading the message for a number of reasons and it doesn't need to be if the information being redacted was not sensitive.

Now we have edits, this could just be some UI around editing the message content to the empty string, at which point clients just display, "message hidden" or similar, with the ability to click through to the old content as with any other edit.

There are a number of ways this could cohabit with real redactions to avoid it being confusing, eg. the default is a soft-delete with redaction available as a further step ('remove history' perhaps?). This option may even only be available to mods or admins in a room, so if you accidentally paste something sensitive, you soft-delete it and then ask a moderator to remove the history.

[ShadowJonathan]

Just to clarify your intention, would you want to have an option to "hide" a message? Either have a moderator do it, or have yourself do it?

I see parallels with github's option to hide/de-emphasize comments in the timeline, making them almost invisible, when they don't pertain to the topic at hand, contain outdated information, or other reasons, but it isn't as "severe" for them to get deleted from the thread, does that sound about right?

If so, i'm all for it, as this could allow matrix into the range of "sincere discussion" and long-standing discussion of github/discourse/forums, right from within a matrix client.

It also may be useful for non-messaging bridges (such as a github discussions bridge, or a discourse bridge), where this may be needed for feature parity with bridging to those platforms.