I am really liking Discourse, it works really well but one thing I am struggling with is not being able to delete topics and posts permanently, like from the DB/server, not just hiding them. I don’t see why this isn’t already built in? - I want to be able to permanently delete because I don’t see why I should keep around test posts, spam or posts which need to be removed because they break code of conduct or are of low quality/copyrighted.
I am used to using forums which allow you to actually delete stuff completely, is this possible or am I missing something? I think soft deleting is a good idea but having the choice to delete from the DB as well is useful.
From reading most of the other topics regarding this problem of not having such a feature to delete something forever, I disagree and I feel it should be a core feature. A great example of why this feature would be useful is what if I had a category that was going to be completely closed because either the community has changed direction or that category was just not needed any more, why would I want to keep lots of topics and “hide” them? - Even if its MBs of disk space, admins should be able to delete these completely.
There is a setting which limits how many posts can be deleted at one time with the Delete All Posts button. The default is 15 posts. It’s here in your Dashboard: /admin/site_settings/category/users. Scroll down to delete all posts max and change that. If users have a lot of posts in a topic, it could take a while to get rid of them all if it’s set to a low number.
If a user has uploaded a file and it is deleted, it’s not permanently deleted until after a grace period has expired. (Think Windows Recycle Bin.) The default number is 180 days. This can be adjusted here: admin/site_settings/category/files and scrolling down to purge deleted uploads grace period days.