Topics are not deleted

[JammyDodger]

From what I understand, the rake destroy tasks don’t delete data from the database, they only soft-delete it. For a hard-delete you would need to access the rails console.

My rails skills are not great, so I’m hesitant to offer any specific advice, especially for a job of this magnitude , but there are a few pieces of existing advice you could use to research what you’d need to do. Eg:

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…