A soft-delete story in three acts
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The public feed
Everything looks clean.
These are the records the platform chooses to show. Hidden items vanish from this view as if they never existed.
3visible
Nothing to see here.The screen is empty. The database is not.
The delete controls
Make it disappear.
Choose a record and press delete. The interface will remove it—but watch what happens in The Ugly.
3remaining
All gone?Only from the visible layer. Open The Ugly to inspect the rows.
The simulated database
Deleted, but still here.
The rows were never wiped. A flag changed from false to true, and the public view learned to ignore them.
3rows kept
| ID | Content | hidden | deleted_at | Action |
|---|
Soft delete
Fast and reversible. The record stays stored, but queries exclude it.
Hard delete
The row is actually removed. Backups, logs, caches, and legal retention may still complicate true erasure.