> My complaint is these features are abused by nasty people who you end up having to work with I mean, not being able to edit or remove messages, by one's own

> My complaint is these features are abused by nasty people who you end up having to work with I mean, not being able to edit or remove messages, by one's own and those of others in the case of a moderator, can be just as susceptible to abuse. Abusive messages not being able to be removed, potentially and needlessly staying in front of hundreds or thousands of users' eyes is one issue I can come up with off the top of my head. Especially true for IRC clients that provide image previews for posted spam links if those links contain disturbing content (and no, it's not a reasonable response to expect people to turn those off; people can enjoy media the way they want, not just the way you deem fit). > When I can't trust software running on my own machines to accurately tell me what someone said yesterday that's unacceptable Just as well Discord, Slack, and others put a little "(edited)" annotation next to edited messages. Plus, one can only edit one's own messages; moderators cannot edit other peoples' messages as they can on forums. > I don't think there's any bigger work around than having to screenshot an app every time certain people send you a message Bots can log messages, including message editing and deletion events. If your preferred Discord/Slack server provides a public log, that sorts that out; if it's your own Discord/Slack server, you can provide your own bot. These can be as simple as 20 lines of Python, maybe less. I'm sure services like Mattermost, which seems to be the top open Slack clone, would facilitate these features more easily. I would imagine Mozilla would keep logs. Further, Discord also automatically provides a moderation log to keep a history of all those events. It really sounds like you're inventing to do with software with which you've little experience.