I estimate that I'm getting upwards of 50,000 message posts (including replies) in my forums.  I think I'd like to delete some of the older messages.

Any comments on this?  Is this wise?  Is there an easy sql command I can send to delete all posts in a particular group that are older than a particular date?

Lance

While I don't have a concrete solution, I looked at the database tables and in theory to delete old posts all you have to do is the following:

1. Delete old posts (do separate delete commands per forumID)
2. Get a count of the number of posts deleted.
3. Update the forum table's "number of posts" column - (ie. number of posts - number in step 2)

Developer feedback would be appreciated.

I still haven't tried this.  I did write some csharp code that will let me easily see how many posts there were in the last 24 hours, by what users, and in what forums.  If anybody wants the code you can send me an email lance at rat-terrier dotcom.

I would very much like the feature along this line too.

In specific, I would like to delete.

• Messages not responded after a cut off date (for example a year from today).
• Messages with zero response (without any cutoff date) and X number of days old.
  

I would like this to be automatically scheduled so I don't even have to do it manually. It just runs every day to cleanup any messages that meet above criteria.

I also would like to

Remove members if they have not come back in more than X number of days. For example a year. (But that's more of a core DNN feature request).

I would like to see the ability to archive old posts. Will this be possible in a future release?

Like Surf and others I would like to be able to delete non-viewed post as of a certain date. It would be a great addition. A Customer

Yes, my users need this too. Can someone confirm that this is in the works? or currently a feature?

Thanks,

Mike

I need this too. I need to delete entire threads based on last post date, and maybe a check to exclude stickies. Anyone have the SQL to do, please post.

I'm trying to squeeze some maintenance tasks into the 3.6 release.  At the very least you will be able to delete/archive posts by date.  Keep posting ideas of maintenance features you would like to see.

Thanks,
Will

We'd really like for posts and threads to be moved to a recycle bin type forum once deleted, rather than being completely deleted from the database. Is this possible?

Cheers

Stipe76,
Now your talkin'

Another feature, and probably food for another post would be to have the configure option for ActiveTopPosts be a selection of just the forums from a specific ActiveForum instance. When you have many forums on your site, it gets unweildly trying to traverse such a long list. I know that Scott Mcculloch had done this by first choosing the page instance and than you could derive what forums (or in his case which categories) to choose from.

I find myself making similar forums with similar forum names and unless I prefix these forums with a state name or some other prefix, I don't know which ones I want to include in the top posts. 

Yes it's a very good idea :
- delete/archive posts by date
- delete/archive posts by last answer date
- delete/archive posts by date only if 0 answer
- delete/archive posts by date if the subject 'contain' or/and 'doesn't contain' at least a word in a list
- all of this can be applied to the whole forums groups, a forum group, or a forum only
- delete/archive posts of a selected user


Seb

For certain people that goofed and deleted a page and forum instance without deleting each forum first...

And then deleted the forumId from the first table instead of working up from the bottom tables. Oh Boy!

It would be nice to have a utility that could traverse all tables and see if any orphan rows exist with a matching forumID. 

Posted By Will M on 2/26/2006 8:07 PM

I need to delete old posts.  Was this functionality added?  Does anyone have some sql scripts to share?

Thanks,
Chris

Would be very interested to get an update on this. Is this a planned feature? In the meantime, anyone have any working scripts ?

This was added to Active Forums 4.1 Enterprise.

Hi Will,

I take it then that there are no plans to add it to the other versions?? I run a charity website and we simply can't afford the enterprise version

Instead of deleting all the old posts, what if there was a way to create a brand new forum section called ARCHIVE FORUMS.
That way, it would make a complete mirror of your current setup of forums, and anything meeting the criteria of an OLD POST, instead of delete, it would automatically move.

Now you have 1 page, with ACTIVE FORUM, and another page with ARCHIVE FORUM.

Same structure, just older posts.

I would hate to lose keyword ranking. The thing I love about AF is that when a post is made, within 10-15 min, I can search on google, and find my post. I have done testing on several different words on the forum topic, and it picks up very very well. Why would anyone want to remove more data from being indexed on their site?

Just doesnt make any sense to me...

Yes, I don't see why you would ever want to delete old posts unless you were on a closed intranet and it was dead information.

It's SEO gold...