Permanent deletion: Is there a database command?

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If your wish is to hard-delete all the soft-deleted posts, then you could loop through them with a rails script and use the destroy method.

That might give some info:

How to delete thousands of Private Messages?

Revisiting this old topic, since none of the answers are 100% correct. The rake task rake destroy:private_messages does not hard delete all private messages, it soft deletes them. They can still be seen by an admin and they can be recovered. The Rails code Topic.where(archetype: 'private_message').where("user_id > 0").destroy_all destroys the topics, but not the actual messages. They are still in the database and can be viewed using for instance the data explorer plugin. This code will perma…