Extension talk:PureWikiDeletion

Have you considered empty rather than a special string like #DELETED? Ashley Y 08:45, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It's a possibility. Some editors have pointed out that #DELETED makes it clear that the intent is to delete rather than vandalize, but a vandal could just as easily replace all content with #DELETED. It saves keystrokes to use empty too. On the other hand, if we use #DELETED, then blanking is unnecessary; we can just add a #DELETED tag to the beginning of a page and leave the rest of the content, so that people don't have to dig through the history to find what was there. Then again, that possibility also exists with #REDIRECT, but in practice almost everyone replaces all the existing page content with #REDIRECT. Tisane 23:19, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

What hook(s) to use?
It looks like it's going to be ArticleSaveComplete. The PWD extension will check the article text every time a save is made, detect if the article has been blanked, and if so, add it to a table of blanked articles that aren't to be counted in or listed in Special:Allpages or any of that other good stuff. Likewise, if a blank article (i.e. one that exists in the table of blanked articles) is unblanked, then it will be removed from that table. I have tested it and it works for API edits too. Tisane 05:25, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Blanking should be logged?
The current spec says: The blanking of a page already appears on watchlists and recent changes, so I think this is redundant and unnecessary. However, it would probably be useful to be able to get a list of all blanked pages and filter and sort it by user and time of blanking, as we do with the deletion logs. So, I will create a special page with that functionality. Tisane 09:24, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
 * The replacing of all content on a page with "#DELETED," or the removal of "#DELETED" from a page should be logged, and listed on watchlists and recent changes like the other logs (the move log, the protection log, etc.)