Matrix-doc: Ability to delete rooms.

[ara4n]

A fairly common request is the ability to "delete a room".

In practice, this could mean someone with sufficient power marking with room with a tombstone with metadata requesting all participating servers drop the room from their DB. However, this would vandalise everyone else's copy of the room.

Perhaps a better bet would be to support room garbage collection, such that if everyone on your local server has hit 'leave' and 'forget' on their copy of the room, the room is actually removed from the server.

[turt2live]

https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/unstable.html#post-matrix-client-r0-rooms-roomid-forget already says:

If all users on a homeserver forget a room, the room is eligible for deletion from that homeserver.

so this sounds like an implementation detail which synapse doesn't support?

[ara4n]

true. i guess i'm more trying to work out what use case something like https://twitter.com/cartocalypse/status/1095322661322977281 is asking for.

[turt2live]

I suppose coming from a UI perspective we don't really have the endpoint for this, in which case a dedicated /delete enpoint makes sense (using the behaviour you've described).

[dud1337]

Using a synapse for a workplace server, this would make usability significantly easier. In particular for short-term rooms, a room administrator should be able to close a room. Equivalent to kicking everyone and waiting for garbage collection.

[ghost]

Any update on this? Seems like it would be a fairly common thing to do.

[hannojg]

There is this PR: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/7613

[ell1e]

@hannojg this is just for server admins though, it would be nice if this could be extended to room admins as well (so e.g. random people creating personal rooms on matrix.org can remove them again if they want to).

[rugk]

See

Possibbility to clear whole chat to remove all messages / destroy chat room
in https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/14401

If you want, I can copy and recreate this issue here?

[ell1e]

I mean there is a difference for private chats and public rooms. That issue appears to be mostly concerned with private chats I think, I am thinking of public rooms I created but then all room admins decide the room is no longer to be kept (e.g. because it moved elsewhere) and want to actually delete it. So I'm looking beyond just removing the messages.

Basically, history clearing seems related, but not necessarily the same thing. Although I guess both could be solved by allowing the room owners (!= just server admins) to delete a room entirely with all its history and contents, since that kind of indirectly also clears the room history.

[rugk]

Fine, created https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/2686.

[richvdh]

@hannojg this is just for server admins though, it would be nice if this could be extended to room admins as well (so e.g. random people creating personal rooms on matrix.org can remove them again if they want to).

For clarity: when @ell1e said "this is just for server admins", I think they were referring to matrix-org/synapse#7613. That PR adds an API for use by server admins. This issue (#1882) covers the usecase of room admins deciding that a room should be deleted.

[ell1e]

@richvdh sorry, yes. that is exactly what I meant, I apologize for my unclear use of "this" that was somewhat confusing in retrospect

[silvernode]

I wanted to delete my room and recreate it but I can't, so now the new room has to have a different alias. This is unfortunate since I already left the original room, hoping that would delete it if nobody else was present and now I can't get back in to change the alias in order to give it to my new room.

[TheEvilSkeleton]

@silvernode contacting the homeserver maintainers and asking them if they can remove the room should work. That's how we did.

[silvernode]

@silvernode contacting the homeserver maintainers and asking them if they can remove the room should work. That's how we did.

I can try sending an email to matrix.org i suppose. Thanks for the reply.