Retention Policies

This feature adds the ability to set retention policies on channels and globally. Such retention policies can automatically remove old messages and files with custom rules.

Note: This feature is only available from version 0.67 or later.

Permissions

The ability to set retention policies depends on two permissions: edit-privileged-setting and edit-room-retention-policy:

• To set a global policy, the edit-privileged-setting permission is required

• To set a per-channel policy, the edit-room-retention-policy permission is required

If you want to enable channel owners to set their own policies, assign the edit-room-retention-policy permission to channel owners - by default it is assigned to Admins only.

Configuration

Retention policies have two levels, global policies (enforced everywhere) and per-channel policies (enforced in specific channels).

To turn on retention policies, set Enabled to True.

Note: If you wish to use per-channel policie,s but not a global policy, set all three Applies to options to False, but set the global Enabled option to True.

Global policies

Note: Tweaking these settings without extreme caution can destroy all message history across your server. Please read this entire section before you turn the feature on.

You can find the settings for this feature in Retention Policy in the Admin panel, under the Global Policy section.

The policy is split up in three parts, a policy for all channels, one for all private groups, and one for all direct messages. Each type has two options:

• Applies to channels/private groups/direct messages: establishes whether the global retention policy should apply to this type. For example, if you only wish to prune messages in private groups, set this to True for private groups, and to False for all others.

• Maximum message age in channels/private groups/direct messages: establishes how old messages may be, in days. For example, to make the policy automatically delete all messages older than 30 days, enter 30; to make the policy automatically delete all messages older than a year, enter 365, etc.

Furthermore, there are three more options that allow you to specify how the policy works:

• Exclude pinned messages: when set to True, pinned messages are not deleted. For example, when you pin a few messages with important links, these messages stay intact.

• Only delete files: when set to True, messages are not deleted, but files are - they are replaced by a simple File removed by automatic prune message. When used together with Exclude pinned messages, only unpinned files are deleted.

• Timer Precision: establishes how often the deletion script should run. when your policies have long lifetimes, or you simply do not care about the precision of the policy, you can lower this to save processing power.

Per-channel Policies

Note: Tweaking these settings without extreme caution can destroy all message history across your server. Please read this entire section before you turn the feature on.

Find the settings for this feature in the Settings screen of a channel, if you have the edit-room-retention-policy permission.

The Automatically prune old messages option has three states:

• Default: uses the global policy if enabled, otherwise do nothing

• Disabled: does nothing; the retention policy never applies to the channel

• Enabled: uses the retention policy described below, instead of any global policy

If you set Automatically prune old messages to Enabled, there are a few settings you can tweak to specify the new policy:

• Maximum message age in days: establishes how old messages may be, in seconds. For example, to make the policy automatically delete all messages older than 30 days, enter 30; to make the policy automatically delete all messages older than a year, enter 365, etc.

• Exclude pinned messages: if enabled, pinned messages are not deleted. For example, if you pinned a few messages with important links, they stay intact.

• Prune files only, keep messages: if enabled, messages are not be deleted, but files are; they are replaced by a simple File removed by automatic prune message. When used together with Exclude pinned messages, only unpinned files are deleted.

Info Available to Users

Users can see if the messages of a channel will be pruned by either scrolling to the very top of the message history, or opening the channel info. A message is displayed if a policy, (global or per-channel) is present, for example: Messages older than 30 days are automatically pruned here or Unpinned files older than a year are automatically pruned here.