The discussion revolves around bulk deleting topics/content from select users in a Discourse forum. christian_01 wants to delete all content from RSS feeds with 1K+ topics, but can’t find an option to bulk delete users and their content.
Canapin suggests adjusting the delete all posts max and delete user max post age settings to allow for bulk deletion. However, christian_01 still encounters issues deleting a user and their posts simultaneously.
When trying to delete posts, christian_01 receives an error message, and riking advises checking the logs for errors. christian_01 seeks a simpler solution, eventually finding success by flushing Redis.
codinghorror cautions that performance problems are expected when deleting users with a large number of posts and recommends anonymization instead. However, christian_01 notes that even deleting a small number of posts caused issues, which codinghorror acknowledges as a problem that shouldn’t occur.
I have been pulling in content from RSS feeds but now I have stopped. I would now like to delete all that content, but from the admin/users page I can’t click a button to delete a user and all their posts/topics.
Is there a way I can override this and bulk delete users and their content? Some of my feeds have 1K+ topics…
Look at delete all posts max and delete user max post age settings in your administration. Change for a higher value, and then you’ll be able to remove all the posts from any user.
Think this topic covers it:
When you raise the two settings I wrote about, you’ll be able to remove all the user’s messages prior removing the user itself (a user can’t be deleted if it has messages).
Check /logs to see what the problem was, and post a redacted version of the env and backtrace here. Alternately, if you check and some but not all posts were deleted, just keep hitting the button until it finishes.
Sorry, laymans terms please?
Visit forum.yourcommunity.com/logs and see if there’s an error entry from when the post deletion failed.
No error messages. It just stops and says "There was a problem deleting the posts’'.
I have a lot of users/posts I need to delete, so there has to be a better way?
I was hoping someone would have replied to:
I managed to get some success by flushing Redis.
You should expect performance problems if you delete users with massive numbers of posts and topics, that’s a rare event – and should be avoided in favor of anonymization whenever possible.
I was having a problem deleting just 10 posts.
That shouldn’t be happening for sure!
