I found myself thinking about a pretty sizable number of chapters I wrote in the past on stories of a particular writer who deleted everything he put out without warning. I respect two things: 1) I should have saved chapters offline somewhere 2) Writers reserve the right to delete their own stories whenever they want without warning That said, what's frustrating is that not only did I not personally get any warning it's happened, but I didn't even realize it had happened until it was way too late to recover. At no point is there ever any kind of notice when your chapters are deleted. I understand when a change is very recent, there is still a chance for recovery. With that in mind, would it be possible for all writers on that story to get some sort of email notification when a story they contributed to is deleted? It could be toggled on/off by the same notifications system that already exists.
I guess I would prefer each user having a collection story where such chapters would go, maybe even maintaining parts of the original structure. That might also serve as a place to manage draft chapters or chapters one may want to pull from a story after they get rejected. I think that's not the main issue. Knowing a date after the last submission and before the deletion would be helpful. As well as other details like the story ID or link.
If such a solution is possible, that would be ideal. Maybe something even like a version of the story that omits pieces by other authors and still has yours in place. I just thought any solution like that seems more difficult than a notification, but you probably know better than I do on that. All of the details you mentioned would be helpful there are unfortunately all the aspects that are impossible for me to retrieve when I don't realize it's gone until long after it happens. I know vaguely some time around late 2020 or early 2021 is when I was writing them, but only from discord messages. Tried wayback when I first realized it 9 months ago, but I don't think I can dig it out of there. Most of my deleted were chapters in Touhou Mind Control. The other was one chapter in a mecha themed collection but I don't recall the title.
A simpler approach might be to use the "Recently Deleted" section. As far as I know it currently only includes stories that you yourself deleted, but chapters deleted by others could be treated the same way. You'd lose the story structure, yes, but since you wouldn't have access to the deleted chapters that others wrote in that story anyway, I don't think it matters very much whether you have (say) 30% of the structure or 0%. We've allllll been there. 90% of backups are made right after catastrophic data loss. (And 62% of statistics are made up on the spot.)
The issue with Recently Deleted is that chapters will be removed after 7 days. I'm actually not sure whether your chapters appear there if they have been deleted by other users, though I would think so. (The chapters I get asked to delete don't end up on my Recently Deleted list.)
