deleting archived cards

[Krzysztof Milejski]

• After how long do archived cards get deleted?
• Do I have to delete them myself?
• If so, how do I do it in bulk?

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen · Accepted solution]

Archive cards are not auto-deleted. They stay there until manually deleted or Sent back to the Board

You can use this free tool to bulk delete (Trello do not support bulk deletion out of the box):  https://trellotools.azurewebsites.net/BatchArchive

[Krzysztof Milejski]

ok, thanks for your answer
but I can't authorize the account because it says: App not found

please give me more detailed instructions

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Krzysztof Milejski Sorry about that... The "App not found" issue is now resolved so please try again (Thank you for reporting this 🙌)

[Krzysztof Milejski]

yes, now everything works fine,
thanks for your help

[Jacob Seeger]

Hi @Rasmus Wulff Jensen I just downloaded this plugin but am getting the error "An unhandled error has occurred. Reload" when trying to load it in my Trello board. Can you help? Thanks!

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Jacob Seeger Hmm, just tried myself on a test-board of mine and worked there fine so not a general issue.

Do you know roughly how many archived cards you have in the board? (10s, 100s, 1000s or more as best guess is that you might be hitting the ceiling on how many cards the Trello API can handle.

If archived cards are a low number then please in your browser try and press CTRL + F5 for a reload with cache reset, Press F12 to get Developer tools enabled an in developer tool be on the console tab so we can see the technical error.

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

On my end I will try to see if I can replicate issue by artificial creating a big amount of archived cards and see if there are ways around Trello's limitations

[Jacob Seeger]

Thanks @Rasmus Wulff Jensen . To answer your question, I've never deleted my archived cards so there are likely over 10,000 in there 😅 let me know if it's still possible to use for my situation. Thank you!

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Jacob Seeger Ok, that is most likely whats is causing the issue right now then.

Trello's API is not too great at handling such a big amount of cards all at once so I thing I will need to test this (make 10.000 cards via the API and archive them) to simulate your experience. And from there come up with a good solution (properly only to show ~1000 of the cards at the same time)

To do the best solution of work with this afterward, may I ask what your plan is to use the powerup for once I get it working. Is it:

1. To delete some/all these 10.000 cards?
2. To move some/all these 10.000 cards?
3. To do something else?

[Jacob Seeger]

That makes sense @Rasmus Wulff Jensen , thanks for looking into it.

To answer your question, I am hoping to simply delete all 10,000+ cards. I think the high archived card number is slowing down my Trello board, so I'm hoping to fix that by deleting these.

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Jacob Seeger :Thanks for clarification. I'm still in progress of makeking 10.000 dummy cards (it takes hours), but expect a new version out that can handle if all goes as planned can handle ~2500 archived cards at the the time

Will notify you in here when new release is out

[Jacob Seeger]

That's great news - thanks so much @Rasmus Wulff Jensen , looking forward to it!

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

@Jacob Seeger: An updated version of the Powerup has now been deployed.

Changes:

• Give a better error message of what is wrong (should your issue not be what we expect)
• Better Loading Progress Screen
• Optimized the retrieval of so it can handle more
• Default it only loads the latest 1000 archived cards, but you can request more (I managed to load all 10.000 of my dummy cards)
• 

Disclaimer: Please brace yourself that it will quite some time to delete 10000 cards [roughly 1 sec/card] (the Trello API has no batch-action for it so it needs to do it one at a time 💤)

[Jacob Seeger]

It's working great now! Thank you so much for the innovative and helpful solution, and for the quick fixes. This is a fantastic solution @Rasmus Wulff Jensen . Really appreciate it.

[Jacob Seeger]

Hi @Rasmus Wulff Jensen , I actually built a custom solution in Python to handle this faster and wanted to let you know the method so you can use it in your widget.

1) First I retrieve my archived cards with a limit of 10,000.

2) Then I store the list and run the following function over the list:

3) Instead of running a loop and deleting each archived card one by one, I'm spinning up 8 concurrent workers that each delete a card from the retrieved list. That way, I'm deleting 8 cards every second instead of 1. I found that 8 was a good balance for not getting rate limited by the API.

4) Once the list of 10,000 has been deleted, I loop through the whole process again until the response from the archived cards list is 0.

I was able to delete all 10,000+ cards in a matter of minutes this way. I'm not sure if the widget can handle threads or concurrent functions, but if so, this should work much faster :)

[Rasmus Wulff Jensen]

Hi @Jacob Seeger Thank for the idea. It is cool and good thinking but as I'm using webassembly (Microsoft Blazor) so unfortunately threads are not an option at the moment. Also as my API Key is shared among all users of the PowerUp I think one user taking up the level of 8 users might cause rate limit to be hit faster causing some to fail while others run, so for now I think I will leave it at current implementation