# Bulk delete of old and spread topics

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-delete-of-old-and-spread-topics/157707>\
**Category:** Product Support\
**Created:** [July 14, 2020, 2:06pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-delete-of-old-and-spread-topics/157707 "2020-07-14T14:06:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![klopsknoedel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/klopsknoedel/32/194126_2.png) [@klopsknoedel](https://meta.discourse.org/u/klopsknoedel)\
**Post date:** [July 14, 2020, 2:06pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/bulk-delete-of-old-and-spread-topics/157707/1 "2020-07-14T14:06:10Z")

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Hi,

we have thousands of old/obsolete topics across our forum which we like to delete. I already searched meta for an appropriate way to achieve this but couldn’t found a proper solution.  
Would it be enough to iterate through a list of topic-ids and set the `deleted_at` - flag of each topic we like to “delete” or is there a better way? I know it’s a quite lazy solution.  
I think it is a little bit of overhead to write an extra (small) plugin to make use of `Topic.destroy` for a bulk-delete.

Kind Regards  
Sascha

P.S.  
Context: These topics produces crawling-issues and soft404 and we like to hide them from search engines. Deleted topics are excluded from our sitemap.

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