The discussion revolves around the ability to completely remove a post from Discourse. bek expresses frustration that, despite being an admin, they cannot fully delete posts, especially when sensitive content is involved. simon explains that staff can delete posts via the Rails console in sensitive cases and suggests using “Hide Revision” for partial removal. JammyDodger informs the community that a new can_permanently_delete setting now allows admins to hard delete posts and revisions directly from the UI, with more details available in a linked post.
Hey there!
I want to remove a post completely. For example can I delete post shown below? I don’t want to see this deleted post shown in red, even if they’re only visible to staff. (If you wondered why I want to remove it, because I have obsession.)
I think discourse is a very pleasant forum software. But sometimes it makes me laugh. I can do a lot of thing as an admin, but I can’t delete post completely… What a contradiction! 
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?
We now have the can_permanently_delete setting you can use to hard delete posts and post revisions from the UI. 
You can read more about that here:
