this is a feature request to make it possible to have a category where users are free to discuss without any concern.
two use cases I can think of:
for newbies who may be afraid to participate, one can config a category whose topics are temporary and is more like a test environment (like try.discourse.com).
for countries with lots of censorship (less freedom of words), it’d be much safer for users to discuss temporarily rather than permanent.
I raised this here:
The general consensus now is that we want to build something like this. I am going to slot it to next release.
thanks but I guess the functionality of these two features are opposite to each other. as you mentioned in the linked topic, the “auto-delete reply” feature is best for keeping well-documented topics, while the “auto-delete topic” feature is ideal for temporary discussions.
isn’t it possible to have both features?
yes of course, then is it possible to add a setting to the categories as “auto-delete topics in this category after … minutes”, just like “auto-close” setting? I’m looking for some way to set a temporary discussion category, and it’d be hard and boring if admins need to set the topics of a category for auto-deletion by hand.
Like @jessicat and @Pad_Pors, I’m interested in such a category-wide setting that automatically deletes topics within a category. I can see that stickies should be preserved with such a function. Maybe optional, topics with many bookmarks or likes could be kept, too, although I’m not interested in that. Do I overlook other topics that should not be deleted?
I figured with auto close and Automatically delete replies after N days most of the similar code should already be there and would just have to be adapted and put into a plugin. But the pull-request is overwhelming me.
Are there or have there already been further steps in this direction? Does the team or the community have any further interest in this?
I think this would be very useful as well.
We have a category where each post is a wiki (for our internal documentation). We use replies to discuss change-requests and these are deleted after 30 days.
We can set up auto wiki on a category level, but it would be really great if we can automatically add a topic timer (auto delete replies after X days) to each new topic in the category. Right now we have to do it manually for each topic which is a lot of extra clicks.
I came here to see if this was possible/request the feature. It would be really useful. Our use-case is a student-support forum where we’d like questions to time out after a specific period of time to avoid cluttering the category with prosaic queries/noise. We’d like to be able to manually preserve some topics where they have lasting relevance, but this would not be the default
Relatedly, it would be cool to have an admin/moderator feature where topics that are about to be deleted can be reviewed before they go. If a moderator could subscribe to a weekly digest of to-be-deletd topics and replies that would be even better.
我也迫切需要这个功能 
是的。我认为选项可以是：
另外：如果将来有人关注此事，我认为同时添加“存档”功能会很有意义。
我想为这个请求添加我们的意见。我们希望为每个类别设置一个选项，管理员可以（可选地）为该类别下的所有帖子设置默认的自动删除主题计时器。
在我们的例子中，我们有一个“分类广告”类别，我想通过自动删除 N 天前的所有广告（主题）来保持其整洁。
谢谢。
我也希望有这个功能。
我也希望有此功能，我的论坛有一个知识库，目前工作人员必须手动将删除回复的主题计时器附加到用户创建的每个帖子中。
您好，此功能请求对我的用例来说将非常棒，其他人也提到了它的重要性。有计划实施它吗？谢谢。
3个帖子被拆分到一个新主题：插件将自动删除引入为类别级别选项
感谢分享这个插件。
这可能是一个进步。
我建议开发者也许可以以此插件为基础，开发一个可以删除N天以上帖子的新插件。
拭目以待……
