How to remove post completely?

No, and it’s not on the roadmap.

Exposed passwords should be changed and the revision hidden.

Database space for those is negligible, and just a pet peeve for some.

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I really think deleting something forever should be on the roadmap, I don’t see the point is keeping posts which are of low quality, spam or topics which break code of conduct on a community, as admins we should have the choice for a soft delete and a permanent delete. If I remove a post because it was spreading hate or toxicity why would I want to keep that content on my servers?

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I agree, in particular not because of space but from a legal perpective. Some soft deleted posts may not even be allowed to remain in the database.

Every DMCA takedown requires you to delete the content from all physical devices.

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Exactly, if a user starts posting content which is not allowed or illegal, I should be able to perform a permanent deletion.

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In understand that you probably want to do that from the interface, but as a safe alternative,

The problem I have with this is it is not really an official way, I think this delete forever should be implemented within the UI. Pretty much any other forum has a soft delete and a delete forever feature :confused:

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I really think this should be a builtin feature.

We get support requests from time to time asking us to fully delete posts from the database. The most common case is that a user has uploaded an attachment to a post that contains sensitive information. It also happens when a user has posted sensitive information in a topic. When we get these requests, we fully delete the post from the site’s Rails console.

For the case where the post can stay, but some details need to be removed, I’m wondering if this can be safely handled with the “Hide Revision” functionality:

For example, if a sensitive document had been uploaded to the post, would editing the upload out of the post and then selecting “Hide Revision” take care of all security concerns?

One more use case when deleting post would be nice: integration with Wordpress. If I delete a post in Discourse - it’s hidden in the forum, but it’s still visible in WP… :frowning: Maybe it’s something to address in the WP integration plugin?

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I’m having that problem right now. And it’s a big issue because WP shows a link on the page depending on whether there is an associated topic. So now I show a link on my page to a deleted topic.

If the idea is that everything should be “un-doable” then why isn’t creating a topic un-doable?

Just checking if this is still not on the roadmap - this would be a useful feature in some compliance scenario’s so we’re considering building a plugin.

To remove a post you made, click the 3 dots (…) then click the trash icon. Note: You have up to 24 hours before a post is permanently removed. This is to avoid accidental deletion of a post!

I think it is possible now. That’s how I understand this announcement

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I completely missed that, thank you!

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Yes, this is my concern. In Europe, companies are legally required to comply with GDPR or they could face huge penalties. If somebody posts personal information, they must also be able to completely delete that information (including from the server), or they should be able to request that the company deletes it. Companies that use the Discourse enterprise hosting might, therefore, might be required to regularly contact Discourse to request that posts are deleted from the database. That creates a lot of extra work and I think also a legal liability.

We now have the can_permanently_delete setting you can use to hard delete posts and post revisions from the UI. :partying_face:

You can read more about that here:

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