Undo deleted posts and sections on your padlet
Ctrl+Z now works on Padlet. Yes, we know it took a while.
Every piece of software you use has undo. Your word processor, your spreadsheet, your email client. You press Ctrl+Z and the thing you just did gets undone. It's so expected that you don't think about it until it's missing. Kinda like electricity, or common sense in a group chat.
Padlet didn't have undo for deleted posts and sections. If you deleted a post by accident, it was gone. Your options were stare at the screen, make a quiet sound of despair, and recreate it from memory. We've heard from many of you about this and we agree: it wasn't great.
So we fixed it. You can now undo (and redo) deleted posts and deleted sections on your padlet.
How do I undo a deleted post?
Two ways. When you delete a post, a little toast notification appears at the bottom of the screen with an Undo button. Click it.
Or, if you're a keyboard person, just press Ctrl+Z (or Cmd+Z on Mac). It works exactly like you'd expect.
What about sections? If I delete a whole section, can I undo that too?
Yes. If you delete a section, the same undo mechanisms apply: toast button or keyboard shortcut. And here's the important part: all the posts inside that section come back too. You don't get an empty section shell. Everything is restored.
We shipped section undo in October 2025, and roughly 770 section deletions are undone every week. That's 770 moments per week where someone would have otherwise lost a section's worth of work.
Is there a time limit?
No. Most apps give you a fleeting toast that disappears after five seconds, like a waiter who brings the check before you've finished your pasta.
On Padlet, your undo history has no time limit within your session. Delete a post at 9am, do three hours of other work, then undo it. It'll still be there.
Even better, your undo history survives page refreshes. Close the tab, reopen it, and you can still undo. We know that "I'll just refresh the page" is most people's first troubleshooting instinct, and we didn't want that instinct to destroy your safety net.
If I delete something on a shared padlet, can someone else undo it?
No. Only the person who performed the delete can undo it. This is a deliberate choice. In a classroom with 30 students, you don't want one kid undoing another kid's intentional cleanup. Your undo history is yours alone.
What happens with moved posts? Say I move a post out of Section A, then delete Section A and undo it. Does the moved post come back?
No, and this is one of those details we thought carefully about. If you moved a post from Section A to Section B, that move is respected. Undoing Section A's deletion brings back the section and all the posts that were still in it at the time of deletion, but it doesn't yank back posts that had already been moved elsewhere.
The alternative would be duplicating that post in two places, which would be confusing. We went with "respect the most recent state of the world," which feels more honest.
How does it work under the hood?
When you delete a post or section, we don't actually destroy it immediately. We perform what's essentially a soft delete: the content is marked as deleted and hidden from view, but it remains in the system, ready to be restored.
For sections, this is a bit more involved. A section can contain dozens of posts, each with their own attachments, comments, and reactions. When you undo a section deletion, we restore the section and re-link all its posts, preserving the original order and content. The whole operation has to feel instant, even though there's a fair amount happening behind the scenes.
The undo history is stored in your browser and tied to your session, which is how it survives page refreshes without needing to be synced to a server.
You mentioned the data. How much is undo actually being used?
Glad you asked. In the last month alone:
- ~31,800 post deletions were undone
- ~65,800 draft deletions were undone
- ~3,100 section deletions were undone
- That's roughly 3,300 "saves" per day, moments where someone would have otherwise lost their work
We also found that the toast button is far more popular than the keyboard shortcut (76% vs 24%).
What doesn't undo cover yet?
Currently, undo works for post deletion and section deletion. It doesn't yet cover:
- Editing post content — if you rewrite a post's text, you can't Ctrl+Z back to the previous version
- Reordering or moving posts — if you drag a post to a different position or section, undo won't move it back
These are on our radar. Undo for content editing in particular is something we'd love to add, though it's a meaningfully harder problem (tracking incremental text changes in a real-time collaborative environment is the kind of thing that keeps engineers up at night and makes them reconsider career choices).
Why did it take so long?
Undo sounds simple. "Just remember what happened and reverse it." In practice, it's tricky in a collaborative real-time application. When multiple people are working on the same padlet simultaneously, "just reverse it" becomes a negotiation between different people's actions and the current state of shared data.
We wanted to get it right rather than ship something fragile. We think the result—persistent undo history, no time limit, works across refreshes, respects moved content—is worth the wait. Though we understand if you need a moment.
Undo for posts and sections is available now for all Padlet users. No setting to enable, no upgrade required. Just delete something and immediately regret it, like the rest of us.