Permanently deleting posts from the db for privacy reasons

[Tim_Jefferies]

I want to nightly delete posts that are in an autoclosed status in a specific category on a regular basis for privacy reasons

as discussed here:

How to reduce database size

I’d like to know how to do this as well. I want to create a category that auto deletes posts. The idea is to have a space where people can speak freely knowing that whatever they post will auto delete after a certain time i.e. for privacy reasons. I have a category set to auto close topics after 168 hours. Now I need to figure out how to delve into the DB (I expect a crontab task is the best way to do this) and delete any posts including uploaded images from the server that belong to this cat…

Would this be the rails command?

Topic.where(closed: true).where(category_id: <your category id here>).destroy_all

Is there any risk to my site if I was to run this command every night?

[Tim_Jefferies]

So I went ahead and set this up and it’s working.

For anyone that’s interested I created a bash script that I run daily from cron:

#!/bin/bash
# Script to permanently delete discourse posts from a specific category that are closed

expect -c "

# This may be $ or # or something else dependent on host environment. Change accordingly.

set prompt \"root@ip-172-31-31-39-app:/var/www/discourse# \"
spawn sudo /var/discourse/launcher enter app
expect $prompt
send \"echo 'Topic.where(closed: true).where(category_id: 11).destroy_all' | rails c > /dev/null\r\"
send \"exit\r\"
"