Delete images shared in Discobot tutorial

I think we might have discussed this before but I can’t find it now - are images uploaded as part of the Discobot tutorial deleted after X number of days? If not I think this would be a good idea - otherwise we end up with potentially thousands of images of little to no value. Perhaps the image can be replaced by a generic “you uploaded an image here” pic?

I have Discobot turned off because of this but would turn it on if we could delete those images…

Fair, but are there really that many random images in discobot replies? I’m quite confident the data will show the total storage here is teeny-tiny… so it’d be a micro-optimization at best.

1 Like

Potentially thousands of users uploading an image up to 500kb (which adds nothing of real value to the forum itself) seems a lot to me.

Even if just 1,000 from every 10,000 members do it, over a membership of 50,000 with just 5,000 members doing it results in up to 2.5GB of wasted disk space.

I think uploading images is obvious enough - so maybe we just don’t need to bot to ask users to do this (or the bot just mentions that it’s possible). Or maybe we could specific which parts of the bot tutorial are included on a per forum basis…

Give me the actual data though – otherwise you’re basically just pulling numbers out of your :peach:

I don’t work that way :wink:

1 Like

I can’t give you any figures because I don’t have this feature on. Perhaps you could have look at the usage here on Meta.

Hosting images locked away in a PM that offer little or no long term value is a waste imo, and a concern for anyone who uses SSDs as their primary disks. It’s also not just adding potentially 2 or 3GB to your forum, but also impacts backups. If you keep 10 or more backups that amount adds up very quickly - if you pay for offsite backups then that impacts your space and associated traffic allowances too. This may not be a concern to you, but it’s a concern for me and I am sure many others.

If you’re really so concerned, you should be concerned enough to look at the data. Until that time…

Also a plugin to auto-delete all discobot conversations older than {x} days is probably really easy to write if you want to fund it on marketplace

On top of all that, you can trivially visit the discobot profile and go through and delete all its PM convos with a few clicks.

Well I was concerned - hence why I switched it off (but I’d switch it back on if this issue didn’t exist).

I could yes, but I believe it should be in core. What’s the issue with Discourse deleting them after a certain time frame? I can’t think if any real benefit in keeping them.

I will put a pr-welcome tag on this one, I can agree that “delete all discobot PMs older than {x} months” task is pretty safe, just a micro-optimization really.

4 Likes

Fantastic, thanks :smiley:

If you (or anyone else) can point me to existing similar tasks I may be able to send a PR for this (assuming it’s the Ruby side rather than the Ember side :relaxed:).

1 Like