Change Matrix room retention time

Systemli's Matrix home server instance has a default retention time of 30 days. We allow values from 1-180 days.

Clients that have already downloaded and stored the event/message might continue to show it, unless they themselves implement support for message retention policies, the homeserver can not do anything about this.

It is possible to send custom events from developer tools of element web and set room retention time there.

  1. The developer tools can be opened by typing /devtools in the message editor.
  2. In the devtools, select “Explore room state”
  3. If the retention has not previously set, `m.room.retention` will not show up in the overview
  4. Click “Send custom state event”
    1. You'll first need to convert the desired time in days to milliseconds, i.e.: 1000*60*60*24*<number_of_days>
    2. Event Type: 
      m.room.retention
    3. Event Content: 
      {
    "max_lifetime": 2592000000
}
    4. State Key: leave this empty
    5. Click “Send”

After sending, you can verify that the retention is set: Go back and choose “Explore room state”. Now m.room.retention should show up in the overview.

Source: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/3800#issuecomment-1030568445

Further reading