[sockwater]

Originally Posted by Ted S

Soft deleting votes is possible but you start to get into more and more variables to check things adding to the queries. I'm not sure it's worth the overhead, even small overhead, for the limited times where it applies.

Here are 2 options:

1. Add a separate table to store the id of any vote that is "soft-deleted". That way current code would stay the same, and only the top helpful posts page would check it.

2. Leave votes intact when hard/soft deleting a post, and clean them out with a daily cron job. That way if you soft-delete a post and go right back and restore it, it would still have its votes.