Allow the deletion of room event history (SYN-601)

[matrixbot]

Would it be possible/not against the general conceptual design of Matrix to implement an API or provide a maintenance feature that allows to delete room history that is older than a given timestamp or is in excess of N events?

We are working on a project that needs to keep the most recent N messages that are not older than T timestamp and flush the rest. Either keeping N most recent events or keeping events that are more recent than T timestamp, regardless of count, would work for our needs.

If there is no plan to add this feature or it is contradictory to the design, is there a workaround to this?

(Imported from https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SYN-601)

(Reported by Erik Seres)

[matrixbot]

Jira watchers: @ara4n @richvdh

[matrixbot]

Links exported from Jira:

relates to SPEC-141

[matrixbot]

We absolutely need to provide a way to expire data older than a timestamp or N events. SPEC-141 (and linked bugs) is where this is being tracked - we just haven't got to it yet :)

-- @ara4n

[matrixbot]

Don't we have this, via the admin API?

-- @richvdh

[matrixbot]

Also: dup of SYN-361?

-- @richvdh

[ara4n]

So we have the admin API for purging history on a per-room basis, but we don't have a way of specifying maximum retention in general (or letting admins specify that). Closing in favour of https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/440 and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/447