Nested notes are not deleted or trashed when parent note is

[desrosj]

Description

When a note has replies and you click delete, you are presented with the following: "Are you sure you want to delete this note? This will also delete all of this note's replies."

I agree that this is the desired behavior. However, this is not the case. The child notes are not deleted at all, they only disappear because their parent note has been trashed.

To celebrate Halloween, I've created a terribly ugly Frankenstein PHPUnit test to demonstrate this behavior in WordPress/wordpress-develop#10442.

Step-by-step reproduction instructions

1. Create a post and add a note.
2. Add replies to the note.
3. Delete the parent note.
4. Observe the child notes are not deleted or trashed in the database.

Screenshots, screen recording, code snippet

No response

Environment info

No response

Please confirm that you have searched existing issues in the repo.

• Yes

Please confirm that you have tested with all plugins deactivated except Gutenberg.

• Yes

Please confirm which theme type you used for testing.

• Block
• Classic
• Hybrid (e.g. classic with theme.json)
• Not sure

[Mamaduka]

I thought WP already handled this behavior for comments. If the parent comment is deleted, I would expect children to be trashed/deleted as well.

[karthick-murugan]

While testing parent–child note deletion, I observed that neither the child notes nor the parent note are being removed. The parent note remains in the wp_comments table after deletion. Please refer to the attached video for reference.

REC-20251031144852.mp4

[adamsilverstein]

While testing parent–child note deletion, I observed that neither the child notes nor the parent note are being removed. The parent note remains in the wp_comments table after deletion. Please refer to the attached video for reference.

@karthick-murugan - right, the items remain in the comments table when deleted, they are moved to the trash by having their comment status changed:

The issue here is if I create a thread:

Then delete the first comment, the replies disappear

as well, however they are not put in the trash state:

[desrosj]

While testing parent–child note deletion, I observed that neither the child notes nor the parent note are being removed. The parent note remains in the wp_comments table after deletion. Please refer to the attached video for reference.

@karthick-murugan This is expected. I don't believe that comments are ever hard deleted by default in Core unless you click the Trash filter and hit the Empty Trash button. If you check the the commentmeta table after you delete the Note, you should see a _wp_trash_meta_status and _wp_trash_meta_time meta key for the note.

I thought WP already handled this behavior for comments. If the parent comment is deleted, I would expect children to be trashed/deleted as well.

I think that there are reasonable arguments for both sides of the argument: child comments to continue showing vs. they are hidden (current behavior).

I took a few minutes and looked into how this is handled and I found conflicting experiences in the wild with very large social networks.

One instance is Reddit.

• User deletes their account, the comment remains and their user shows as deleted.
• User deletes the comment itself, then both user and comment text show as deleted.
• If a user is blocked by the comment author, the comment and author are shown as deleted.

In all scenarios, every nested comments remains.

On the other hand, deleting a comment on Facebook that has replies or nested comments deletes all of the child comments.

The current behavior in Core is somewhere in between. Child comments are not deleted, but they are no longer shown on the front end. This is the same regardless of whether the top level comment is trashed or marked as spam. That said, there is currently a bug in Core where the replies are still included in the comment count (Core-55309). So it's possible they used to show at one point. That's a larger, separate conversation that must be had elsewhere another time.

Pulling the focus back to notes, I think Google Docs is a better service to compare with. When a top level comment is deleted there, the entire thread is deleted. My recommendation is to do the same perform the same action on child notes when the parent is deleted: move to trash.

My recommendation is to follow that example and for any comment of the note type to be handled in the same manner as the parent.

[jeffpaul]

@desrosj I would mostly look to mimic existing UX from Google Docs (over, say, Reddit or Facebook) so if there's a clear handling in Google Docs for how potential child comments from a parental comment being deleted works then perhaps that's the most optimal path here?