I'm not seeing any harm, but there is a potential benefit. While I have no interest in digging up old proposals, we seem to have players who keep records of all sorts of historical data from the game. The proposal clearing code was put in place when we had Megabytes of storage. We now have Terabytes. Every discarded proposal ever written would probably occupy less than 2-3 megabytes of storage, since they're nothing but text. The old ones are gone and not recoverable, so we're only talking about proposals from this point forward.
My only suggestion is that we consider how they are to be accessed. If we simply failed to remove them from the disk, then links like
https://www.nationstates.net/page=UN_view_proposal/id=vihor_1500136456 would work in perpetuity. That would be enough for me. Having players include a link in the relevant thread (which would mostly be
Illegal GA Proposals) would completely satisfy my desires for access.
If you think it's important to give everyone access, here's how I'd do it:
0 Legal • 2 Illegal • 2 Public • 0 Discard • 2 Total Active •||• 1000 Defunct • 50 Withdrawn
We can't recapture the thousands of deleted proposals, so the Defunct and Withdrawn numbers would start accumulating from the date of implementation. That's why I don't see a point in listing a Grand Total.
There still remains a need for a Hard Delete option. Some proposals are removed as offensive by the moderation team. As Eluvatar probably knows, we have such a mechanism in place already. My suggestion is that any links or tallies should not include any proposals that are Mod-purged. They should actually be deleted from the disk, as we already log those deletions.