Hi. I would like to delete ALL topics from a single category (~5000 topics) in order to re-import these topics from phpbb. I could delete these topics, but since Discourse doesn’t really delete them but hide them, my phpbb import won’t re-import these messages. I can’t just re-import from scratch…

I’m not sure – this might also be performance intensive depending on how many weirdo Rails ActiveRecord things this causes to cascade through. Any thoughts @neil have you ever done this?

I would do this in batches of say 10, building up to batches of 200 depending on how long it takes. Topic.where(category_id: XX).limit(20).destroy_all It does cascade all stuff it needs so it could take a while.

Hi, I’ve done this without setting a limit and it properly removed all the 5000 topics, but it didn’t seem to destroy all the posts from these topics as the posts table still had the same number of records. Plus, maybe there is a lot of related data in other table to take care of?

Interesting… we are missing a dependant destroy here, I am not sure why. app/models/topic.rb main infos.sort_by! { |i| -i[:width] * i[:height] } end def generate_thumbnails!(extra_sizes: []) return nil unl…

Thanks for your reply :slight_smile: Do you see any table which can contain potentially annoying residual data or do you think that would do the trick and it would be a safe enough method to definitively destroy my topics?

I can not guarantee anything :slight_smile: you are in uncharted territory so you will need to walk all the tables and audit it

[image] Canapin: I could delete these topics, but since Discourse doesn’t really delete them but hide them, my phpbb import won’t re-import these messages. Make sure you also delete the import_id custom fields on posts (topics?) if you want to ensure the importer re-import them.

Hi, Finally, I ended not having to delete my topics, I was able to do what I wanted to (not necessarily deleting them ; this could have been a solution but not the only one), see Migrate a phpBB3 forum to Discourse - #367 by Canapin , Migrate a phpBB3 forum to Discourse - #377 by Canapin and Migrate…

The proper way to completely delete hundred of topics via rails?

Product Support

zogstrip July 6, 2018, 12:38pm 10

Make sure you also delete the import_id custom fields on posts (topics?) if you want to ensure the importer re-import them.

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The proper way to completely delete hundred of topics via rails?

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