Delete the history of a conversation

[vv01f]

I would like to delete at least selected conversations with a contact intentionally.

[t2d]

I think it is dangerous and counter-intuitive, that the history of a conversation is saved although I have deleted the conversation explicitly from the left pane.

[IeP4nieF]

Is there some progress on this feature? I think, that it is a very important feature for many people.

[dermitdemdino]

I also vote for the fact that you can delete the history without ending the chat.

[martin21]

I found a way using SQLiteBrowser. Completely at YOUR OWN RISK:

• Quit Dino.
• Make backup of database in (~/.local/share/dino/dino.db)
• View table messages. Find a message of the chat in question. Note the number for counterpart_id.
• Then in the SQL tab do SELECT * FROM message WHERE counterpart_id = SOMEID; and verify whether those are really the messages you like to remove.
• If sure: run DELETE FROM message WHERE counterpart_id = SOMEID;
• Run Dino again.

Dino may try to download the last messages from server again and may not be able to decrypt them if you use OMEMO encryption, but otherwise it appears to work.

[trymeouteh]

Would like a setting to have Dino delete old messages that are either older than X months or days or are X messages back to keep the conversation under 500 messages for example.

[ghost]

Would like a setting to have Dino delete old messages that are either older than X months or days or are X messages back to keep the conversation under 500 messages for example.

+1 for this, this will assist long term use

[je-vv]

I'd like to add, that it's pretty useful to be able to select one or multiple messages in a chat, to them delete them. Also it would be good to be able to select a chat, and totally remove its contents, without even having to go inside the chat, and then select all messages to then delete them. I'm used to both of those mechanisms to clean messages. It's no good one carry and infinite set of messages, no matter the device. So deleting them at will is something I thing should be a must. Thanks !

[z36r2850o]

No progress since 2018?

[detrout]

There's a number of different deletions that'd be helpful.

It'd be good to be able to set a default history limits by number of messages or by age, and to be able to set different values for specific MUCs or IMs.

Also when closing out a MUC it could be useful to be able to delete all messages with that channel. (Conversations has a "Clear History" option that can be selected at will and gets offered when leaving a channel).

And lastly it'd be useful to be able to delete individual messages or messages from a specific user in a MUC if someone is being annoying.

[selurvedu]

FYI, it is not clear that the conversation history remains in the database when a contact gets removed. Users may get a false impression that the chat history gets erased when they delete a contact. The contact deletion UI should suggest removing it.

[selurvedu]

I just realised it's not as simple as clearing the local history. There's MAM, and deleting the messages from a local database may be useless if the server still holds them in the archive. The history would really get forgotten only if the server does not have a copy.

That would be the case if the server does not support MAM, or if message archiving is disabled, or if the archive is limited (when entries reach a certain age, they get removed, or when the archive reaches a certain number of entries, the least recently added ones get removed), and the deleted messages have already been removed from the server due to that limit.

I assume that "the messages are present in the archive" would be the default case for many (and probably most) Dino users in 2024, and that has to be dealt with somehow. The least-effort way to address that would be adding a warning about the message archive to the deletion dialogue, until a better solution is implemented. I understand how this may be non-user-friendly and generally undesirable, but not having the feature at all is worse no matter how you look at it. The current suggested way of removing messages directly from the database does not address the MAM problem either.

[selurvedu]

And, of course, not removing messages from MAM would mean Dino would pull them from the archive again as soon as the dialogue is recreated/reopened.