how to romove pm of the members?

[صلاح الدين]

how i can romove all pm of member by date
or romove pm of all members by date

[Arantor]

There's no method for doing so, because it's impossible to say whether the PMs were actually important or not.

It's also not allowed to be discussed in the forum because of the team policy on considering PMs private - and sharing discussion on how to handle them in the DB is not permitted.

[flapjack]

hmm sorry for getting into maybe "taboo" topic, for I was thinking about pruning pm's myself. in a busy forum db can grow very fast. what for example with user who are not logging in for a long period? I think there should be some option for setting the PM buffer (like let's say for example 30days) after which messages not "saved" for later (important ones) should be pruned automatically. what do you think?

[MarcusJ]

I remember there used to be a query in the forum you could run to purge PM's in 1.1 using phpmyadmin.  Guess those days are gone.   

[Kill Em All]

No, because again, a PM can be very important for a user and they want there to be online copy of it. I like to keep all my PMs personally. I know a lot of others do to.

This will never be made into a mod or feature. It is just invasive and not fair to the end user.

[MarcusJ]

I don't want to get skewered for asking, but why not allow a mod that produces a hard copy of a user's PM's which could be saved off site?

In the end isn't it up to admins to decide what is and what isn't kept in their database?

I'm more curious than I am trying to be contradictory. 

[Kill Em All]

It could benefit for users to beable to export their PMs. But couldn't you just copy and paste them to a notepad file?

[MarcusJ]

Yes but that kind of backs up what I didn't quite say.  The PM's are easily backed up.  So why the upset over an Admin asking for the ability to purge PM's?  I can understand personal reasons for not wanting installed.  But I don't see a logical reason to forbid it.

[Kill Em All]

a PM can be very important for a user and they want there to be online copy of it.

What if their HD crashes.

[MarcusJ]

What if the site admin does a poor job of backing up the DB and it is compromised? 

I see your point of view.   What I don't understand is the thought process behind forbidding anyone to create a mod to purge PM's for those who might want to use it.  If the mod allowed an admin to view other people's PM's easily then I'd be absolutely against it.  This is simply a request from an admin to clear info from their database.  To me it's no different than purging topics or posts.  They all contain info, some of it private and some of it important.

I just feel it should be down to the site admin to make the decision.  While I know it technically is still their decision.  I don't get the reasoning behind now wanting to help him.

Again not trying to cause contention.  I'm just curious about it now.

[Kill Em All]

To answer your first question, backing up the database has nothing to do with it being compromised. I can back up mine everyday and it can still be compromised. All it relates to is that if it is hacked, you can easily restore an updated one.

Yes, the owners can view and delete the topics, but there is not GUI method of it. It would not be fair at all to the end user.

This discussion could go on for awhile. Lets not hijack the OPs topic. Saladine, let us know if this helped.

[Arantor]

The logic behind it is that the admin has no way of knowing which ones are important.

If there's a problem, set a limit on the number of PMs a user can have.

Reason for forbidding such a mod is that if you're smart enough to write a mod like that, you'll probably be smart enough to write a mod that lets you view said PMs and be inclined to write/distribute such a mod - such a mod is not permitted here because the management feel that it's an invasion of privacy. And if you don't discuss how to do it and don't allow mods that do similar things, you lower the scope of being able to tell less scrupulous admins how to do it.

At least... that's the theory.