Feature Requst: User specific retention policy

[rzorzorzo]

Retention duration is currently only available for streams not for private messages. Some users, for privacy reasons, want that their messages should be automatically deleted after N days. Other users do not want this. It would be therefore good if a user could set a retention duration for his/her messages. It would be helpful if admin could allow user to set this setting.

As workaround I could add some code to the current retention code. Since I am new to zulip, it would be helpful, if someone could point me to the location in the code.

[timabbott]

This is a tricky user experience issue. A conversation between two users arguably belongs to both of them, so whose retention policy applies to that conversation? The more strict of the settings, or the less strict? And how does one communicate to users whether a conversation will be automatically deleted?

I'm not sure this concept is the best design, vs. an "off the record" conversation mode that some other chat products have that would tag individual messages as they're sent.

[zulipbot]

Hello @zulip/server-settings members, this issue was labeled with the "area: settings (user)" label, so you may want to check it out!