On a side note, I implemented a Topic garbage collection. Each night, topics of size 0 bytes are deleted, (but the RCS file kept, for future reference, or if this topic is re-created in the future).

Thus empty topics do not appear any more in searchs, and users are allowed to remove topics. In my experience, all delete requests are asked immediately after creating the topic, the author while writing the first version of the topic realizing that the name was badly chosen, so complex issues about refs and stats do not apply.

This feature does not preclude the need for RenameTopic, but can be a nice addition.

I plan to code this as a perl plugin to hook into the save code, so that saving an empty topic would delete it this way. In the meantime, my script is a one line of unix shell:

   find . -type f -name \*.txt -size 0 -exec rm -f {} \;

The new TWiki release does not let you save zero sized topics.

-- JohnTalintyre - 11 Aug 2001

AllowBlankTopics allows zero-sized topics and this sounds like a nice user interface; imo, it fits the user's mental model about pages and topics.

-- WillNorris - 02 Mar 2005

(copied from TrashCanWeb)

To delete a page, delete all of the content of the page. At regular intervals, a reaper checks for zero-length .txt files in the data directories (perhaps in any dirs.) It moves the .txt,v files into a hidden TrashCanWeb if the zero length topic has been some amount of time since it's last revision. Five days sounds like a good number.

-- KevinKinnell - 08 May 2000

I like Kevin's idea of deleting topic text to eventually delete a topic. It is a radical, but very logical and wiki'ish idea once you grasp it.

-- PeterThoeny - 09 May 2000