Hi folks, One of the Discourse sites that I operate is preparing to undergo a re-launch, and due to the large amount of inactivity on the forum, and the type of posts that have been made in the last year or so, I’d like to remove/delete all topics and start over fresh on the forums. Is there an ea…

Hi Jeff, We really just want to delete the topics and categories. We’d like to keep users and all of the css work that has been done on the instance.

I don’t know that we have a simple way to do that at the moment, but it does come up a fair bit. Can we create a rake task that would remove all categories and topics @techapj ? Perhaps add this to your list as low priority?

Thanks Jeff! We’ll figure out something.

Hello, Are there any updates considering an easy way of wiping out every thread-post-category in a discourse forum? Thank you in advance.

The easiest way is to use rails command line, ssh into your server and then cd /var/discourse ./launcher enter app rails c Post.where("user_id > 0").where(post_number: 1).find_each do |post| PostDestroyer.new(Discourse.system_user, post).destroy putc "." end :warning: be sure to make a backup…

Thanks a lot @zogstrip for the quick answer! Can you suggest a quick/safe backup method?

Use the backup feature in Discourse :wink:

Oh, my bad. Had to check first before asking. Thanks anyway! :wink:

Does running PostDestroyer.destroy actually remove the record from the database or does it merely mark the post as deleted, keeping it in the database? There will be a lot of uses for a script that actually DELETES all the topics and posts, leaving everything (like site settings and users) there. …

Help Wiping all Posts from a Forum

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codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) June 23, 2016, 7:06pm 2

Do you want to delete everything and start from scratch, or just the topics, categories, users?

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Help Wiping all Posts from a Forum

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