Archiving and deleting a page

Archive

Archiving puts a page away. It comes out of your list, out of the rotation, and out of what Smoke reads — but nothing is destroyed and it can be brought back at any time, exactly as it was.

Archive is the answer almost every time. Work that finished, a project that ended, a page that turned out to be a bad idea: archive it.

Archiving is presentation, never permission. An archived page shows nobody anything they could not already see, and hides nothing from the people who were on it.

Delete

Deleting is final, it is an admin’s act, and Smoke only offers it for a page that holds nothing at all. If there are lines on the page there is no delete — archive it instead.

A finished line still counts. Somebody’s completed work is not an absence, and a page of ten done lines is a record of what happened rather than an empty page.

The reason is that a page is a place several people may have written in, and “delete” would destroy somebody else’s work as a side effect of tidying your own. A page with nothing on it has nothing to destroy.

Your own page cannot be deleted at all.

Ending a line

A line is open, blocked or done — and if you are not going to do it at all, delete the line. “Done” means finished; there is deliberately no “dropped”.