Comment 4 for bug 2023348

In addition to patron visible notes manually added by staff for various reasons, our consortium also makes use of these notes via some action triggers:

- Patron account will expire soon
- Patron is billed for a long overdue item

At the beginning of COVID, we also used the patron visible notes to communicate closure information.

Patron visible notes can exist in a number of states. Deleting messages in some of these states makes perfect sense, with others it's less clear. These are the possible states of patron visible messages:

N - New or Unread by patron
R - Read by patron
D - Deleted by patron
NA - New or Unread by patron, Archived by staff
RA - Read by patron, Archived by staff
DA - Deleted by patron, Archived by staff

Notes in the following states are visible to the patron:

N
R
NA
RA

Notes in the following states can currently be deleted by staff:

N
D

It seems straightforward that notes in the DA state should be deletable by staff without need for any kind of prompt.

I would share the concerns raised above for the following states:

R
RA

Based on the additional discussion, if this moves forward, I would lean toward a permission to restrict deleting notes in the R and RA states. I can certainly think of circumstances when it would be appropriate to delete messages in the R or RA states, but I think it would be rare.

One more comment:

I think the ability for staff to remove N and NA should be consistent. In Angularjs no Archived messages can be removed by staff. In the New Angular Circ interface, Archived messages can be unarchived, but it shouldn't be necessary to unarchive a note just so it can then be deleted.