Deleting all messages from a User in a Category

[Iceman]

Hi guys,

Recently I had the need to delete all posts from a user in a specific category. Leaving aside “debates” on deleting content I thought “oh, easy, just use the search and then pick all the results using the checkboxes and delete them”.

However, it seems that doing so allows me to delete The Topics and not so much the messages, even though the search is giving me the messages as results, not necessarily the topics (although they are there as well, yes).

Is there a “safe” way of doing this? At first I thought that I would be something very extreme to the DB (and I don’t discard that possibility) but since I can bulk-delete 50+ topics from the UI… maybe there is a way of doing that for messages only? (Or a way using the console, I just don’t want to “try” and blow up the DB )

Thanks!

[JammyDodger]

I don’t have personal experience of these, but I believe you can ‘soft’ delete using the API -

Reverse engineer the Discourse API

Discourse is backed by a complete JSON api. Anything you can do on the site you can also do using the JSON api. Many of the endpoints are properly documented in the discourse_api gem, however some endpoints lack documentation. To determine how to do something with the JSON API here are some steps you can follow. Example: recategorize a topic. Go to a topic and start editing a category: [image] Open Chrome dev tools, switch to the Network tab, select XHR filter: [image] Perform the op…

@Iceman

(Or a way using the console, I just don’t want to “try” and blow up the DB )

And there are a few topics on ‘hard’ deleting if you search for ‘rails delete post’.

If you can give a few more details about what you’re trying to achieve, people may have more specific tips.

[Iceman]

Hi @JammyDodger

Thanks for the links.

@JammyDodger

If you can give a few more details about what you’re trying to achieve, people may have more specific tips.

I just want to delete all messages from a user in a specific category.

PD: Maybe using the Console? I just don’t want to nuke my DB…

[JammyDodger]

@Iceman

PD: Maybe using the Console? I just don’t want to nuke my DB…

There’s some ongoing discussion about a similar thing in this topic: Delete deleted-posts permanently in bulk?

Hopefully that can provide some inspiration?

[Wingtip]

Apologies for the necro, happy to create a new post if required.

We have a politics category and some users would like to delete all their posts from this category for obvious reasons. Is there any way to easily do this for them?

[Arkshine]

A solution can be to use the Rais console.

cd /var/discourse
./launcher enter app
rails c

Then you can follow the following form by filling the category slug and username.
You copy the code and paste it into the console.

Note:

• It doesn’t delete the first post to avoid the topic being deleted
• If you target a subcategory, provide the parent, e.g.: parent_cat_slug/cat_slug.

Please make a backup before any changes.

Category
  .find_by_slug_path_with_id("=CATEGORY_SLUG=")
  .tap do |c|
    u = User.find_by_username("=USERNAME=")
    Post
      .joins(:topic)
      .where(user_id: u.id)
      .where("topics.category_id = ?", c.id)
      .where.not(post_number: 1)
      .where(deleted_at: nil)
      .find_each { |p| PostDestroyer.new(Discourse.system_user, p).destroy }
  end

[Wingtip]

Thanks! This is fantastic.