Deleting topics from forums

Remove unwanted or inappropriate topics from the Forums application.

To run administrative commands, you must use the wsadmin client. For more information, see Starting the wsadmin client.

When you remove topics from a forum, the topics are soft-deleted. To remove forum topics from the database completely, you must purge the forum trash. For more information about purging the trash, see Purging forum trash on a schedule.

To delete forum topics, complete the following steps.
Start the wsadmin client from the following directory of the system on which you installed the Deployment Manager:
```
[app\_server\_root](../plan/i_ovr_r_directory_conventions.md)\profiles\dm\_profile\_root\bin
```
```
app\_server\_root\profiles\dm\_profile\_root\bin
```
where app_server_root is the WebSphere® Application Server installation directory and dm_profile_root is the Deployment Manager profile directory, typically dmgr01.

You must start the client from this directory or subsequent commands fail. For more information, see Starting the wsadmin client.
Start the Forums Jython script interpreter by using the following command:
```
execfile("forumsAdmin.py")
```
If you are prompted to specify a service to connect to, enter 1 to select the first node in the list. Most commands can run on any node. If the command specifies a file by using a local file path, select the node where the file is stored.
If you have not yet created a variable that contains the forum topics that you want to delete, create one now. You can get a list of forum topics in hash table format by using one of the ForumsTopicsService fetch commands. For more information about these commands and how to use them, see Getting a list of forum topics.

When a user leaves the organization and you want to delete the forum topics that they created, use the following command to identify the forum topics to delete:
```
ForumsTopicsService.fetchTopicsCreatedByMember(String extId, String type)
```
For example:
```
janetstopics=ForumsTopicsService.fetchTopicsCreatedByMember("ajones10@example.com","email")
```
You can also fetch the topics by using the employee's member uuid. For example:
```
janetstopics=ForumsTopicsService.fetchTopicsCreatedByMember("778CE573-78A5-2ECF-8525-7346003DB078","uuid")
```

Use the following command to delete forum topics:

ForumsTopicsService.deleteTopics(Vector forumtopics) : Moves the specified forum topics to the trash. Forum topics in the Trash view can be restored if they are restored before the trash is emptied.

Returns a java.util.Vector. Each object in the vector is a java.util.Hashtable that describes a forum topic that cannot be deleted. A returned empty vector indicates complete success.

This command takes the following parameter:

forumtopics
:   Vector of hash tables that describes the forum topics to be deleted.

For example:

```
ForumsTopicsService.deleteTopics(janetstopics)
```

Parent topic:Managing forum trash

Related information

Starting the wsadmin client

Purging forum trash on a schedule

Purging specific forum content from the trash

Restoring deleted forum content