Confusion over deleting threads older than...

[sbatson]

I've been searching both here and on vbulletin.com trying to find a good, safe and reliable way to auto delete threads in a forum that are older than x days.

My confusion is that I'm seeing all sorts of conflicting answers. Some said it couldn't be done (which I don't buy), here I found a download that is supposed to do it, but there's been so many messages about problems with that programs config files or features in some cases deleting all the messages, I don't want to risk that.

I'm running RSS feeds to a single forum and I simpy want to have the messages age out after a few days. I'm a newbie to vBulletin, so I still have a lot to learn. I've done coding in the past, including some SQL, but I'm quite rusty. This seems like such as common thing someone might want to do, I'm frankly suprised it's not built in, or that there isn't some type of simple plug-in or tutorial to do this without risking the threads you want, especially with RSS Feeds.

I don't know the vBulletin code well enough, nor do I want to spend a bunch of time trying to figure it all out, if I wanted to do coding, I wouldn't have bought vBulletin. It seems to me, that deleting x threads that are over y days in forum z should be possible with a single, well crafted Query. Something that could be put in a file that could be run using the Task Scheduler.

Am I missing something?

Any suggestions and/or pointers in the right direction?

[calorie]

As the vB license allows you to set up a private and protected test board, where you can install and test modifications, you might want to check out the auto prune mod here. If you don't want to test modifications, then you could set up your fourms with a 'Default View Age' so only X days worth of threads are shown by default, and then use the stock 'Prune Threads Manager' when you truly want to be rid of threads.