Completely deleting previous versions of a post or message

Support
1

Say you had to send someone an Android debug log. These logs contain a log of private information. You shouldn’t post that URL in public, and if you message it in person the URL or attachment should be deleted soon after.

Even admins or moderators shouldn’t be able to recover that URL or attachment.
If we can’t delete it it will forever remain visible to the sender, and to all admins and moderators. These logs accumulate over time and it’s a lot of sensitive information lingering forever.

How can we not just hide that URL or attachment but actually delete it?

1 Like
2

with this PR, it seems possible. i like :slight_smile:

3

Sounds like something we need indeed. And it should also apply to messages.
Wow this was committed 3 hours ago? Great!

4

Hi, it seems that feature merged is not the similar that title contains. With data explorer I found that some version of certain wiki topic had a big attachment which I’d like to destroy.

Just want to say how to delete an attachment from version the post on self-hosted instances. Unfortunately method from Search attachments by storage name cannot be applied in this case (unable to get sha1 from filename).

First find sha1 using SQL:

sudo /var/discourse/launcher enter app
su - discourse
psql
SELECT filesize, original_filename, sha1 FROM uploads WHERE filesize > 3000000 order BY filesize desc;

then you get sha1. Next, close the connection to db, exit from user to root and open rails command line:

ctrl+d
ctrl+d
rails c
pry(main)> Upload.find_by(sha1: '<sha1>')

Finally you get url of the attachment pointing to the filesystem location. The question of the topic is still opened.