Why is it not possible to permanently delete topics or posts?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

We now have the can_permanently_delete setting you can use to hard delete posts and post revisions from the UI.

You can read more about that here:

Introducing permanently delete post functionality

When a post is deleted in Discourse, we perform a soft-delete. This means that post is still present in the database in case an administrator wants to recover it later. A soft-delete is not sufficient when the deleted post contains sensitive information and must be pruned from the database completely. For those situations, we are introducing the ability to permanently delete a post. [image] This feature was implemented under a hidden site setting because of how dangerous it can be, once a pos…