A user has flagged one of their personal message topics to be deleted.
It has about 1200 posts in it.
The max deletions option is set to 2000.
Yet when we select all posts for deletion it says ‘Error please contact your user administration’ when its the administrator doing the deleting?
Even selecting batches of 20 posts i.e. selecting all replies, doesn’t delete the posts?
Bit frustrating please?
Would deleting the topic itself rather than individual replies be a suitable alternative? (ie. deleting from the topic wrench)
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Does everything else work as expected? Can you visit the admin area of your forum?
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Yes, can visit settings.
Topic was deleted when responding to the flag, but it only deleted the first post which is the topic and left all the replies.
Ah, that may be why deleting the rest of the posts is blocked. Deleting the topic/PM is normally enough as now the users can’t access it and only an admin[1] can view the topic.
If you do want to delete the replies as well you can undelete the topic and try again.
and possibly a moderator as it was a flagged PM ↩︎
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Thank-you but tried that twice and it still didn’t work.
Hmm. 
Giving it a run-through on my test site to confirm what’s expected, and bulk deleting posts from a deleted topic is indeed possible so it’s not that (little bit of error 500 weirdness undeleting them, but that’s not relevant here).
Is it only this topic/PM? Can you create a new PM with yourself and see if you can replicate the issue.
Thank-you.
I replicatd it with myself 1 topic post and 3 replies as suggested and the flag by me followed by the admin delete worked.
I went back to the large thread and tried again.
This time I selected replies; it selected 20 of them and when deleted it showed them all surrounded by the red colour, as if they were deleted.
I refreshed the page and they back as if nothing happened to them.
Did another test.
More weirdness.
Created a personal message topic.
Replied to it with admin.
Flagged the pm topic requsting a deletion of the whole thread.
Received the flag message as admin.
Selected All - the 2 posts basically.
‘Deleted all’ and it only deleted the first post.
Had to go down to the next post; ‘selected down’ which selected it; deleted it and the delete went through.
It’s a bit too temperamental for comfort to my mind please.
Still no progress on the over 1000 posts PM thread.
Thank-you.
Just to emphasise the point from earlier that there’s no need to individually delete the posts if the topic has been deleted (just in case that saves you some time chasing this issue 
). Once the topic is deleted the participants would no longer have access to any of the posts, and it’s the same for PMs as it is for public topics.
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Understood, thank-you.
But firsty when the topic is deleted can admins still see the remaining thread?
And secondly, this morning I can’t seem to find it anywhere, so I think the delete has happened, and it just took a whole lot of time behind the scenes for it to tke place.
But could it be parked somewhere else now - that I haven’t found yet please?
By the way, it can’t be found by the user (good thing), nor have I (Admin) been able to find it now.
In the normal course of things, Discourse soft-deletes posts and topics, meaning that they still exist in the database and can be recovered at a later point if needed. These soft-deleted posts/topics get the red highlighting and are removed from view and inaccessible to most users (barring admins, mods, and any users in groups added to delete all posts and topics allowed groups). As moderators can only access PMs when they’re flagged, this also means they don’t have unrestricted access to deleted PMs in the same way.
To view a list of deleted topics, you can append ?status=deleted to a topic url (eg. https://meta.discourse.org/latest?status=deleted), however deleted PMs are trickier to find as there’s no collated list of them. You would be able to still see them if you had a link to them, and you can find them using the data explorer if you have it installed.
To permanently delete posts and topics, you need to enable a hidden site setting (can_permanently_delete) which would allow you to hard-delete them and completely remove them from the database. You can find more info on that in this topic - Introducing permanently delete post functionality
Does that help explain things?
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Thank-you Jammy.
It does explain it nd understood.
Thank-you for your assistance.
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