Retention settings per chat channel

[jimkleiber]

Continuing the discussion from Introducing Discourse Chat (BETA):

@sam

@Alec

Key things for them (given I explained it as forum = stuff you want to store vs chat = calling the referee a muppet) is ensuring chat is transient. Something like all chat older than 14 days is deleted. Or entire chat rooms self destruct after 14 days. This was part of the privacy side.

Absolutely, we plan to add chat retention rules fairly soon. By default we are thinking about keeping this at 90 days, but you will certainly be allowed to push this down to 2 weeks.

I’m trying to set up something of an online dojo and I was thinking to use one of the chat channels as a sparring ring. For this specific channel, I’d like to set the retention to 1 day or even lower, maybe to a few hours. For other channels, I’d like to have the retention be infinite. For others, maybe even a few minutes.

Is there any plan to add this and/or other chat-channel specific settings?

If not in the pipeline, any suggestion on how hard this would be to implement in a plugin?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@jimkleiber

any suggestion on how hard this would be to implement in a plugin?

Not that I’ve looked at the code, but it should be pretty easy to set up a job that would clean out a channel. The hard part would be figuring out a ux to manage it. If you were content to hard code it, it shouldn’t be but a few lines of code per category once you figure out how to create a job.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@jimkleiber

Is there any plan to add this and/or other chat-channel specific settings?

Nothing concrete yet, but this is certainly an interesting use case! We are going to need to wait a bit here till we get the “chat channel info” screen done.

[jimkleiber]

Ooo nice, I’m excited a chat channel info screen is in the cards. Sounds great to me.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Yes very much on the cards, it will show the list of members in a channel, was a huge repeat request from various testers of chat.

[Parad0x]

The Chat-Integration in Discourse-Core works great.
The global retention time is fine, but I’ve the same requirement as Jim.
Is it possible to get retention per channel?

[Parad0x]

@sam

Nothing concrete yet, but this is certainly an interesting use case! We are going to need to wait a bit here till we get the “chat channel info” screen done.

What is the status of that “chat channel info”?

I would like to start the use of chat. But on our site the “Topic-Specific Channels” need long retention. “Public Main Chat” only a short retention.

Thank you for your time.