Timed auto delete of older messages

[RichGriese]

Would be great if the channel owner could have an option to set all channel posts to auto delete in some set time like 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days. I know the owner can delete all channel posts with a button, but I am talking about a rolling delete of only posts older then the settings.

Cheers!

[antstorm]

@RichGriese Believe it or not (I know it's been quite some time since you've requested this feature), but I'm actually close to finishing this one. So one thing that I'm trying to figure out is the preferred behaviour when switching between the settings, imagine you've changing the timeout from 7 days to 1 day — should it remove all the > 1d messages immediately? Or let messages record their expiration when they are created? But in this case what to do with messages that were created with a chat that keeps messages forever?

@simurai would love your input on this as well

[RichGriese]

@antstorm, Freaking awesome to hear. My first thought is if you change the period, it should automatically delete everything to that new period. Why? Let's say you got 1hr, 1day, 1week, & month options, and your currently set at one month, and you want to change that to 1 week. Well... your new idea is to have 7 days of history, but if you don't go with the immediate change you gotta wait like 3 weeks to accomplish your new view.

Yet... Personally I would not care, since if I was gonna change from 1 month to 1 week, I'd probably be wacking the whole history and starting fresh.

I'm so happy to hear that you've actually been working on this option.

Cheers!

[antstorm]

@RichGriese that's a really good point. I think this combined with a one off warning should be enough to make people understand how this works.

I'll keep you posted on the progress. We'll probably release this as manual control first, meaning that I'd be able to set this manually for your channel for you to try out. And the next step is going to be a UI control accessible to moderators.

[RichGriese]

@antstorm, Awesome! When you decided to do that, there are two channels I really want to try to promote this forum/chat feature on; [REMOVED] If you could set them to a 24 hour expiration I'd then start to talk them up in the web site communities they are attached to. It will take some time, to attract people, but I'm hoping this feature itself will be a draw once people understand it.

You're the best.

BTW... let me know if/when you turn on the auto-deleting, so I can add the tlk icons to the sites, and "open the flood gates" as the case may be.

Cheers!

[RichGriese]

@antstorm Is this still coming? Cheers!

[antstorm]

@RichGriese great news, I've got this deployed and running! So far so good. I haven't yet added a configurable input, but I can change this setting for your channel manually for you to try it out. Just give me a link and what time you want this to be set to.

[RichGriese]

@antstorm Awesome! If you wouldn't mind, could you set; [REMOVED to keep people from snooping :)] to all delete posts after 24 hours. Cheers!

[antstorm]

@RichGriese no problem, all done!

[RichGriese]

Awesome... you're the best. Cheers!

[RichGriese]

@antstorm FYI... I was sitting on a channel (for about 30 minutes... I had a red dot, not a green dot) waiting for a 24 hour delete to come up, and noticed that the delete is not "pushed" out. When I opened the same channel in a new window the 24+ plus message was gone, but to make it disappear on the tab I was sitting on I had to refresh the tab.Now sure if that is how you were implementing it, but I figured I would report. Deleting is happening, you are awesome, but it's not dynamic. Cheers!

[antstorm]

@RichGriese thank you for the kind words! :) I'll double check, but it should remove (fade out) expired messages from the channel automatically without having to reload the page. Also in case you still have the tab open — are there any JS errors in the console? And which browser are you using?

[RichGriese]

@antstorm I am using Chrome on a Chromebook (ChromeOS). Good to know that you are fading expired messages (what I was calling push). It may have been because I was sitting to long on the tab with no activity, and was little red dot not green dot mode. Will try to post crap to one of my channels and test if out over the next few days. I do have errors in my console, but they seem to be all about depreciated extensions. They all start with [depreciated] then a variable which are; GainNode.gain.value, AudioParam, BiquadFilterNode.gain.value, BiquadFilterNode.Q.value, and BiquadFilterNode.frequency.value. I'll look to see if I get additional errors as posts expire. Talk to you again. Cheers!

[RichGriese]

@antstorm I noticed auto-delete happen. The black post line become grey. It's still there, but it is auto greying and dissappears once you refresh. So... if someone set up a machine and leaves it on 24/7 the will be able to read long history, but that's probably not a very use case. So, it looks like all is working great. Thanks for implementing that. Cheers!

[antstorm]

@RichGriese thanks for verifying this! Yeah, I know it might feel weird that these messages are not disappearing altogether, but when implementing this we thought that it might be less confusing to just fade the messages for people who technically where there when they were posted.

[RichGriese]

@antstorm I disagree. your libel to have more confusion with the greyed out item. Let's say a channel is set to delete after 1 hour. Now, let's say someone is sitting on that channel for 2 hours. And they are talking to someone that comes in 5 minutes ago. 2 hour man scrolls up and mentions a url posted 1.5 hours ago. 5 minute man says he can't see it. 2 hours man says he's blind. 5 minute man says 2 hour man is hallucinating. Etc...

If on the other hand past items totally disappear both new visitors and folks that are sitting on the page for hours will see the same things.

Cheers!

[antstorm]

@RichGriese that is definitely a good point, but to me it sounds more of a case for a stronger indication of expired messages. Otherwise you're got disappearing messages and if you had a different tab open you might have had missed the message altogether.

[RichGriese]

@antstorm, Auto-delete is working flawlessly. You're the best. I was hoping you could change the delete time period of Nutley, RichGriese, & webulite from 24 to 48 hours. I'm realizing that 24 hours is to short for me to promote a "daily" check cycle. The 48 hours cycle should allow someone to post / check early morning one day, and then late night the next day, and still not miss anything. Sorry for the hassle, but the change would be really helpful. Enjoy life! Rich

[antstorm]

@RichGriese no problem, man, I've updated the TTLs for all your channels to 48 hours