Hey!
I wanted to confirm / ask - I believe exo said that t/suki would auto-delete posts after inactivity for 30 days. I know that she also said though that we wanted to index t/suki posts so that it can be a tool for helping others and searing for questions / seeing help. I do think that the general posts should be auto deleted after a time. I want to host threads for like art jams and such that i would do in general because i don’t want them to last forever it would be better if they did delete after a time.
but i’m wondering if posts in help or maybe show-off i’m not sure, should also be auto-deleted after 30 days? I feel like especially in help if would be good to be able to go over past topics and find information to see if your questions has already been asked/answered.
At the moment, I’ve only set up t/suki to auto-lock inactive posts after 30 days.
I’m not terribly inclined to delete posts because:
Discourse does not have a built-in feature or official plugin to auto-delete inactive topics. I’d have to find a plugin that does it and I’d have to be very careful to not introduce a bad plugin or misuse it.
Discourse doesn’t make a distinction between posts deleted for problematic content versus posts that are deleted just because they’re old. All deleted posts are reported to mods and admins in the UI as a red number, which implies to me that it should be seen as a bad or undesirable thing to do.
I tried out post deletion before creating the forum and I found that it messed up some stats and made the forum report a few things incorrectly so I get the impression that deletions are not really handled that well.
Personally, I like the idea of being able to refer to old posts, even for threads like art jams.
For now, I don’t really want to delete anything unless it’s for a moderation reason. I might change my mind though, if the community finds that it would prefer that.