set certain boards to have a post expire time

[iamdamnsam]

It would be cool to have certain boards expire posts, like if you had a test board, with the expire set at 30 days, when a person posted it would show for 30 days then be deleted.

[David]

Yes this would be a cool idea.  My question is how do you regulate time.  Since a daemon is not always running how do you check when the 30 days is up for each post.  I have run into this problem with something else I wrote but didn't come up with a good solution.  Checking everytime somebody visits the board is a bad idea because it is server intensive but checking every time the admin center is visited may not occur enough.  Ideas?

[iamdamnsam]

why not have a cron tab run the expire script?

[David]

why not have a cron tab run the expire script?

Most hosts do not allow people to run cron programs.

[iamdamnsam]

I couldn't imagine hostins a site without shell access

So there isn't a way to run it by a set system time?  I guess running it when the admin center is accessed would work.

[Ben_S]

phpbb2 has such a feature... maybe someone could have a glance @ the way they do it

[bartolomeu]

"Posted_on_date" + 30 (or a $[variable] that could be modified in the admin center of course) wouldn't do the job?

[David]

Yes, something along those lines would work.  But my question is how often is it checked to see if it needs to clean up posts or do other maintenance tasks?

[iamdamnsam]

I think checking the admin center is the best besides a cron so far.  Cron option would be nice though