this is a feature request to make it possible to have a category where users are free to discuss without any concern.
two use cases I can think of:
for newbies who may be afraid to participate, one can config a category whose topics are temporary and is more like a test environment (like try.discourse.com).
for countries with lots of censorship (less freedom of words), it’d be much safer for users to discuss temporarily rather than permanent.
I raised this here:
The general consensus now is that we want to build something like this. I am going to slot it to next release.
thanks but I guess the functionality of these two features are opposite to each other. as you mentioned in the linked topic, the “auto-delete reply” feature is best for keeping well-documented topics, while the “auto-delete topic” feature is ideal for temporary discussions.
isn’t it possible to have both features?
yes of course, then is it possible to add a setting to the categories as “auto-delete topics in this category after … minutes”, just like “auto-close” setting? I’m looking for some way to set a temporary discussion category, and it’d be hard and boring if admins need to set the topics of a category for auto-deletion by hand.
Like @jessicat and @Pad_Pors, I’m interested in such a category-wide setting that automatically deletes topics within a category. I can see that stickies should be preserved with such a function. Maybe optional, topics with many bookmarks or likes could be kept, too, although I’m not interested in that. Do I overlook other topics that should not be deleted?
I figured with auto close and Automatically delete replies after N days most of the similar code should already be there and would just have to be adapted and put into a plugin. But the pull-request is overwhelming me.
Are there or have there already been further steps in this direction? Does the team or the community have any further interest in this?
I think this would be very useful as well.
We have a category where each post is a wiki (for our internal documentation). We use replies to discuss change-requests and these are deleted after 30 days.
We can set up auto wiki on a category level, but it would be really great if we can automatically add a topic timer (auto delete replies after X days) to each new topic in the category. Right now we have to do it manually for each topic which is a lot of extra clicks.
I came here to see if this was possible/request the feature. It would be really useful. Our use-case is a student-support forum where we’d like questions to time out after a specific period of time to avoid cluttering the category with prosaic queries/noise. We’d like to be able to manually preserve some topics where they have lasting relevance, but this would not be the default
Relatedly, it would be cool to have an admin/moderator feature where topics that are about to be deleted can be reviewed before they go. If a moderator could subscribe to a weekly digest of to-be-deletd topics and replies that would be even better.
I also desperately need this function 
Yes. I think options could be:
Also: if this does get attention sometime, it makes sense to me to add “Archive” at the same time.
I’d like to add our voice to this request. We’d like to have a setting for each Category where the admins can (optionally) set a default auto-delete topic timer for all posts to that category.
In our case we have a Classified Ads category and I’d like to keep it tidy by having all ads (topics) older than N days be deleted automatically.
Thanks,
Gunnar
I’d like to have this functionality as well.
