I have been using PhpBB for some time now for several boards. I have however found a rather large short coming with PhpBB over a few other boards, the lack of a trash can. When you delete posts or a topic its permanently deleted and there is no way to restore it. I would request that some form of feature be added that didn't actually wipe the posts/topics out at deletion, but actually "saved" them in the ACP as "deleted posts" or something of that nature. Either that or simply moved them to another forum, like one of the mods that someone has made does.

Having a volatile approach to deleting posts might be good, but for an accidental delete operations you are screwed since there is no way to roll back that change. And that is hardly convenient nor is it practical. I have had this happen a few times to me and the amount of stress it causes to find posts missing because someone accidentally deleted something they shouldn't is not pleasant.

Adding a way to delete post a non-volatile way would come a long way to prevent posts etc being deleted unintentionally and would allow the delete to be rolled back should it have happened in error. Heck you could even make it selectable, ie allowing the various board owners whether they wanted the full on volatile "if its gone its gone, or the non-volatile "we still keep a backup even if you delete it" approach on their board. I know which of the 2 I would choose.

Perhaps even make it so that after x days deleted posts gets pruned from the database/forum or whereever the backed up posts are stored.

I expect I am not the only one requesting this feature or would like to see it added.