In a discussion titled ‘How to make an undeleteable topic?’, chickenrocket seeks to create topics that cannot be deleted — similar to system-generated topics — to protect confidential company materials from accidental or malicious deletion by moderators or compromised users. Lilly clarifies that while users can delete their own posts, topics can be protected by setting category permissions to restrict creation to admins and allow read-only access for others Lilly. chickenrocket confirms they have department-specific categories and asks whether group members can delete content; Lilly explains that only group owners, moderators, and admins can delete, and that Discourse defaults to soft-deleting topics — which can be recovered via /latest?status=deleted Lilly. Importantly, permanent deletion requires enabling a hidden admin-only site setting Lilly, meaning moderators and leaders cannot permanently delete topics without admin intervention. chickenrocket expresses relief that recovery is possible, and thanks Lilly for the guidance.
As you know, when you first setup discourse, some default topics are created by the system account and you can’t delete them (you can by using the console but that’s not the point), I’d basically want to make a topic undeletable because our company has around 100ish employees and to prevent any of them getting compromised (such as forum moderators and leaders) I’d want to make confidential topics such as handbooks for certain departments and protocols undeletable.
Thanks!
Hi @chickenrocket welcome to Meta 
If you are simply wanting to disable the ability of users to be able to delete their posts, then perhaps admin-setting max post deletions per minute set to 0 is what you want?
No, users should be able to delete their own posts, what I’m trying to achieve is basically a topic which can’t be deleted, but can be archived, locked, unlisted, etc. Like the topics created by the system account. I tried to impersonate the system account and create a topic however that topic is deleteable by moderators/administrators and the system account itself
Is there a command I can run to make the topic not have a certain property or something along those lines? Thanks
I don’t know about one topic, but you can create a category with permissions for admins to create and everyone else to read only.
We have department leaders/heads which have their respective groups and categories.
Also, can anything in the category be deleted by the group members or only by the group owner and moderators/administrators?
also important to note that Discourse only soft deletes posts / topics by default. Permanent deletion requires enabling a hidden site setting:
Deleted topics can be found in your /latest?status=deleted path.
Oh, well that solves all abuse-related issues if it can just be recovered lol. Just quickly; are forum moderators/leaders able to “permanently” delete topics?
Go to the category you want to secure and click the admin wrench in top right corner:
Go to the security tab and select your group level permissions:
If you see my previous post, you will see in the link that any permanent deletion requires enabling a hidden site setting that can only be used by admins.
Thank you!
No problem, glad that helped. good luck!
