How can I permanently delete a topic with multiple posts?

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AI-generated summary

The discussion centers on the most efficient method to permanently delete a Discourse topic containing multiple posts. Jongin initiates the thread by asking how to permanently remove a topic with several posts, noting that the standard procedure seems to require deleting posts individually before the topic can be removed. HAWK suggests that deleting the first post might automatically remove the entire topic, though they admit they haven’t tested this. Arkshine proposes an alternative workflow: selecting all posts for deletion first, and then permanently deleting the empty topic. Mako-Poisoned and Heliosurge express appreciation for the information, with Heliosurge suggesting the feature be documented.

However, kddkd provides a critical counter-example in Chinese, reporting that this workflow does not work as expected. After soft-deleting a topic and its 75 posts, they attempted to permanently delete the topic but received an error message stating that the 75 posts still needed to be permanently deleted individually before the topic itself could be removed. This indicates that the “permanently delete” function does not support batch operations for posts, requiring users to handle each post one by one regardless of the selection method used for soft deletion.

1

How can I permanently delete a topic with multiple posts?
With this method, i only can delete posts one by one e later the topic

2

Does deleting the first post not delete the entire topic? (I haven’t tried.)

3

What about selecting all posts first (it’s two clicks), deleting them, then permanently delete the topic?

The image shows a section of a message board from Feb 21st, featuring a discussion about a discourse forum with a cursor icon, a lock icon indicating staff-only access, and a button suggesting user interaction. (Captioned by AI)

4

Hey, I wasn’t even aware of this…good to know!

5

That pic should be added to a Documentation topic. As part of a how to. :wink:

6

Hello,

After testing, I found that this doesn’t work.

I first soft-deleted a topic and its 75 posts by selecting all of them. However, when attempting to permanently delete the topic, I received the following message: “There are still 75 posts in this topic that need to be permanently deleted before the topic itself can be permanently deleted.”

It seems that permanent deletion only applies to individual posts and cannot be performed in batch.