Currently Group Chat history settings let you to set a number of last messages to be show. There could be a setting to show messages based on they age (x days old). But, this should be combined with the current behavior (x last messages). Because someone would be willing to show 2 days old messages, but just 25 of them. Because this could be a LOT of messages shown if one set this to 12 days old.
It could also be helpful if we could set this for each MUC-room individually.
According to the XMPP MUC (multi-user chat) standard, the way to do this is by allowing the client to ask for a specific time-window of messages.
Some chat clients already implement this. For example, one of the most popular chat clients for OSX, Adium, requests only the messages since the datetime of the user's last viewed message. Unfortunately this does not work with Openfire.
Should Openfire honor such client requests to limit history? A request would look something like:
sopolko, this sounds as a separate issue. I have filed this as OF-600. This ticket though could be still implemented to set the limits on the server's side.