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Pruning old PMs
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Arantor

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Pruning old PMs
« on May 9th, 2013, 06:07 PM »
This comes up fairly often, so I have a proposal about this that would effectively solve all the issues around it (at least IMHO)

Have a flag attached to each PM to indicate 'saved' status. If a PM is 'saved', it cannot be deleted by the user unless they unsave it (feel free to change the word). This would allow users to delete in bulk without having to worry about accidentally deleting messages.

Then, the admin has the power to set a time on deleting messages that are not marked saved/locked/preserved/whatever you want to call it. The admin gets a control on cleaning up the database while users get the power to protect things they want saved that are important.

The lock feature would always be available to users regardless of anything else, while the deletion aspect would only occur if the admin turned it on and set a number of days - and that part would be off by default.

How does that sound to everyone?
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xrunner

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #1, on May 9th, 2013, 06:29 PM »
Sounds pretty good to me. I'll need to make sure the members are aware of the saved flag and that PMs can be pruned via an announcement. Some of them probably have hundreds of PMs that they'd have to go through to mark saved or not, but that's their problem. :whistle:

I assume after an upgrade from SMF all the PMs are defaulted to not saved.
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Arantor

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #2, on May 9th, 2013, 06:36 PM »
Yeah, that's one of the issues. I'd actually probably be inclined to set them all to locked in that case or suggest admins send out a notification before turning it on because it will end up deleting old PMs from when it's turned on (e.g. anything 30 days old), it's not like it would then start the countdown - though I guess it could work that way too.

Of course, fresh installs without any imports don't really have that issue ;)

spoogs

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godboko71

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #4, on May 9th, 2013, 11:44 PM »
Sounds like a useful feature to me no idea how many times I have deleted my own stuff by mistake
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Nao

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #5, on May 10th, 2013, 12:05 AM »
I'm still of the opinion that said 'pruning' should happen in conjunction with the sending of a PM archive by e-mail... e.g. one HTML file per conversation, maybe in 'print' mode, or something close to that.
IPB did it, and this is one of the few features from IPB 1.3 that I've always missed in SMF...

Arantor

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #6, on May 10th, 2013, 12:35 AM »
Oh, I want to have the whole extraction thing going on but I'm generally frightened of the PM code. The main PM code is actually one of the largest source files in both SMF and Wedge -_-

I think a lot of people have a lot of different approaches for the reason that they have different goals. Some people just want the ability to manage their PMs a bit faster, some people want to be able to control how much space is used and whatnot and discourage hoarding[1] and I want to try and provide options that can be used to provide a reasonable balance.

I'm only too aware I can't solve all the issues for every user but I can provide enhancements that do make it easier for people where possible :)
 1. I remember when there was a migration of systems when my old company was taken over, the number of people who were 'OMG I can't work inside a 100MB email inbox' was astounding. Of course, I knew how to organise my inbox as well as store files I needed so I had access to everything I needed quickly without having a glut of old useless mail in my face too.

Powerbob

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #7, on May 10th, 2013, 06:32 AM »
I think that's a great idea. Always missed a function like this.
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Nao

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #8, on May 10th, 2013, 07:12 PM »
Does that mean you're open to the idea of mail archives, Pete? ;)

Arantor

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #9, on May 10th, 2013, 07:24 PM »
I was never against it... I've been saying for a long time that exporting PMs should be a core feature... management around that is another matter entirely.

Nao

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #10, on May 10th, 2013, 11:39 PM »
Okay, then it's more a matter of who will be pissed enough about it to start work on it... ;)

Arantor

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Re: Pruning old PMs
« Reply #11, on May 10th, 2013, 11:42 PM »
I'm already pissed. I'm not pissed off, there's the difference :P

I will note it's already on my todo list with a note of 'proposed, initial feeling positive' so at some point I'll do it. But I'm noodling around with the editor changes I've posted about - because I do actually want to give people the ability to drag items around and make new ones and stuff because it's regularly requested but I'm taking it slowly, because I'm psyching myself up for the RL paperwork I need to do tomorrow (annual governmental report filling in, pages and pages of reporting)
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return_raw buggy if enableCompressedOutput is on »