Is it possible to configure chat messages to delete themselves from user's computers after a certain amount of time?

I’m not sure if my question is clear, but I am curious to see if there are any settings or plugins that exist that allow messages to be deleted from a user’s computer after a certain amount of time. I would like to know if all messages can be deleted on the client-side, even though I will continue the audit trail and logging on the server side. Basically, log all conversations on the server, and none on the user’s computers. (At least after a specified time or after a conversation is closed, et cetera.)

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Hello there!

As far as I know, I haven’t seen a plugin that deletes the message archive from Openfire to client side.

You have to delete the message archive on the client side manually.

[Spark 2.8.3] But you can Disable the Chat History on: File > Preferences > chat > Tick the Disable Chat history.

Don’t worry, that’s only on the client side. The Chat history will still be logged on the server side via Message Archive plugin.

But I do hope that some day, a plugin for it will be released .

Have a good day!

I doubt such feature will be added. So disabling local history and the option to enable it (via Client Control) seems like a viable workaround.

In the XSF (the XMPP Standards Foundation), the subject of ephemeral messages came up in October 2016. So far, no support was added as far as I know. Although I don’t see a lot of benefit (as a server, you’d depend on a client implementation that is out of your control to actually delete stuff), this does keep pop up in one form or another. Interesting.

Id like to see an option in spark (or any other client) that would delete local history on exit, or based on a date…ie anything older than 24 hrs, a week, month, etc… I had this request from my old job and tried to hack something together. the downside of disabling history all together is if a chat window is closed by mistake, you lose the history (even if the application is still running).

You can recover the chat history in the Openfire server via Message Archive plugin.