Tony; it's not difficult but I would put money on it not being long before you start thinking "this is tedious" followed some time later by "I wish I hadn't started this".
As a Moderator you will have a drop - down arrow on each topic, and one of the available options is Delete Topic.You will have to plough your way through your message archive finding and deleting each one individually; there is no "Mark for Deletion" followed by "Delete Marked Topics" that I am aware of; I did once look because I was trying basically the same exercise as you are now contemplating.
Please bear in mind that if (for example) you found and deleted an expired topic somewhere and deleted it, the space it occupied will be filled up from the next page, and what fills that space might be another expired topic that you want to delete. Also, (IIRC) deleting any given topic doesn't leave you still looking at the page from which you deleted it; I have a vague recollection of the display reverting to the start of the entire message archive, which makes the process even more time - consuming.
For future use you might want to consider the use of Hashtags for Sales or Wanted. This has the advantage that such marked topics can be made to auto - delete after a set period of time; a month would seem suitable. If anyone forgets to insert a hashtag you (as? moderator) can edit the Subject Line to add one; more work for you, yes, but less time consuming than trying to find the topic a month later so that you can delete it!
I have to be honest at this point and admit that as yet we have not set this up on the group I moderate; we just have very limited "management" hashtags set up at present. In my purely personal opinion hashtags can look extremely messy if used to excess, and that is what I wish to avoid. In addition, knowing the high probability of a topic drifting in use (quite legitimately as often as not) any given post could bear no relation whatsoever to the hashtag at the top.
I suppose this must be some sort of inverse to Godwin's Law; the longer a given thread runs the greater is the likelihood of a post bearing no relation to the subject that started it.
Chris.
