[discussion] - Providing better options for deleting data from the database

[chrismclarke]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Currently few areas of the site give the ability to delete content (e.g. a how-to), and when it does this is handled by adding a _deleted:true field and updating the _modified timestamp within the document instead of actually removing it.

The reason for this is due to current caching mechanisms (i.e. only query for data newer than whatever is most recent in the cache, to avoid downloading the same information multiple times. In doing so an older document that has been deleted won't be detected).

I'm pretty sure for GDPR we need users to be able to permanently delete data (even if only via manual request), and it makes sense to be able to keep the database a bit tidier

Describe the solution you'd like
The simplest solution would probably be to keep the _deleted/_modified updates and simply remove the rest of the document content. An alternative would be to add subcollections or separate collection for archived/deleted where this is stored and used to notify the client, who can then update their cache accordingly. A bonus with this is we could also have both semi-permanent (archive) and permanent delete

Describe alternatives you've considered
We could make more full requests to the database (not just after modified dates) and limit data usage a bit with pagination, although I think I'd still much rather a system where efficient caching removes the need to request the same data multiple times. Open to thoughts/opinions.

Additional context