Clever deception, if intentional

A blogger is accusing the SF Chronicle of one of the most clever deceptions I have heard of in a long time (via Instapundit). Apparently their commenting system has a feature where a deleted comment is still visible to the original poster, but not to anyone else. In other words the original poster thinks his comments are still there but to everyone else the comment appears to have been deleted.

I have never seen this kind of comment system behaviour before. Probably because it would be highly unethical and very easy to get caught. Of course it’s entirely possible that this is an unintentional flaw in the system.

Has anyone else ever seen anything like this?
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tags: Blogging