Soft-deletes are bad, m'kay? - Frans Bouma's blog. Have you ever ran into database tables with a field which is used to mark if a row has been 'deleted' ?
Probably. These fields are used to implement 'soft-deletes'. For the soft-delete impaired, a quick introduction. Code Smells. I'm often asked why the book Refactoring isn't included in my recommended developer reading list.
Although I own the book, and I've read it twice, I felt it was too prescriptive – if you see (x), then you must do (y). Any programmer worth his or her salt should already be refactoring aggressively.