I know that each topic has a timer that allows deletion in a certain amount of time.
But how to do this with ALL topics and posts older than 2 months? And just leave one or another topic that I want?
By the way, how do I know which files (Photo, video, audio etc) my members are uploading on the forum? And how to delete everything at once?
I am not sure why you would want to do this? It seems an overly destructive action for a forum?
I would guess the reason could be exacly same why chat has such time limit. All content is not ment to live long.
In this case I assume it has something to do with lack of hard drive space.
I asked a similar question:
The answer was:
It may be that this plugin could be changed slightly to serve your purpose.
It wasn’t such an odd request as the final comment was:
I think I was confused by the ‘all’. Topics with no replies, or topics in certain categories does make more sense.
Though reading some of the OPs other recent topics, it does seem to be about storage space as @Jagster says. I don’t think using the soft-delete options in the UI would work for that as everything would still be there in the database (I think even images/media have to be removed from the post before soft-deleting to be marked for tidying up by the sidekiq job?)
I think @nathank had a similar issue some time ago, and had to use the rails console to deal with it? That may be a little advanced for an everyday user though.
Wouldn’t this harm SEO or is that not a concern? History is your hook into internet search.
Far better to migrate to a bigger server with more space?
No server space, and no money to buy more space. In my country the dollar is very high.
Also, something very annoying happens when new members of my forum comment on a topic with more than 1 year of existence.
It depends. It is much harder to get some SEO value fo forum topics. It looks like Google values heavily the very first post, not following answers. But the first one quite often is not that… good in the meaning what people are searching for.
Sure, something like ServerFault, StackOverflow etc has high value, but those are so big. And even then I’ll get more hits to more bloggish sites.
But even here is a lot of topics with zero SEO value, because those aren’t reflecting asked questions on side of Google.
My forum is really small, but I’m using it quite often similar way than WordPress. I had few diary type topics, but that didn’t work SEO wise. When I started totally new topic everytime I had longer explanation, or story, I got a way better response from Google.
How often old topics get views here? Not too often and that’s why we have autobump — and in most of time bumping fails because three years old topics are more or less so outdated.
If we stay in SEO value this will happend
Please, don’t get me wrong. That is an universal question, not Discourse dependent. But it means one or two things: content itself doesn’t give anyking SEO value and most of content in the Net is dead weight.
What we should do in the perfect world would review old content every year, save useful ones and delete every topics and posts without any extravalue. Plus everything that have been unvisited.
Same thing what we should do with private files and images on our devices. But we don’t do cleaning, but we will buy more and more space.
No one will do it. Way too much work. Quite few would review content even if system would ask shall this and that saved or deleted. That’s why there is a huge risk where high value content will be erased just because of some time limit.
So — that poor admin will pay extra every month for storing old, rusted and dusted content. But it has nothing to do with SEO. SEO means only for content that is used, someway.
What is SEO? I couldn’t translate this
The dollar in my country is very high. I can’t pay more server to keep old content. Is there a way to automatically delete this? If not, how do I delete content older than 3 months?
Those acronyms sucks 
Search Engine Optimization.
Everything we should do to help Google showing our content before other hits.
It has expanded to include very abstract value how Google is ranking every content.
How do you delete old content from your forum? (Topics)
I don’t, mostly. But when I do I do it manually.
Topics and posts per se don’t take too much space. Images and videos do.
I don’t know how much everything else, that is more or less just pseudo content (badges, gamification etc.) will bloat size of a database, though. Not much, I reckon.
I came searching for this feature as well because I am coming around to the idea that data is as much a liability as an asset.
I don’t want people to go digging into the achieves to find things people might have said 5 or 10 years ago.
I am coming here searching for something similar. But my case is a bit different. I set up a server for internal use five years ago, and our lawyers are now setting a retention policy for all internal data. So I am looking for a way to delete posts older the X years. If anyone has any ideas in a direction to explore I would appreciate the pointers.