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Salvaging a broken thread
Anonus
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I deleted a user's account on my forum and this caused all of their threads to get wiped out with their content (here is an example: heapershangout.com/index.php?p=/discussion/267/our-dreams/p1).
Is there any way to restore a thread like this, sans the deleted user's posts?
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Only if you have a backup of the database before you erased it. It actually gives you different options when deleting a user. Obviously you picked the one where all his content gets deleted.
Hi, Anonus's co-admin here.
The problem isn't that it deleted all the content from the deleted user--that was indeed the option we wanted. The problem is that every _other _ post in the thread apparently got taken out as well. Is this a bug of some kind, or is that the intended behavior?
Oh, I'm unaware of that behaviour.
You get three options it is important to understand the consequences of those options.
That is why it is rarely worth deleting user content, as it is disruptive and annoying to read.
You are also within your rights to keep it as it is public content, not private content. You can make this clear in you terms. I remember one member said someone from his forum took him to court for refusing to delete his content, that guy lost becuase it is public domain and the terms were clear.
grep is your friend.
it is difficult to know what happened as we don't have the original thread to compare it with.
grep is your friend.
It is important that I understand the consequences of those options, and I do accept responsibility for those consequences as a forum admin.
But this is simply a case where those options didn't function as intended. We chose the option to blank the deleted user's posts, but this had the unwanted (and, as far as I can tell, unforseeable) consequence of erasing every post made by other users in threads started by the deleted user.
I'm not trying to be confrontational, and I apologize if it comes off that way, but I just want to make it clear that this is a technical issue, not a moderation issue.
from a pure bughunting perspective:
If you can reproduce this problem that would be great. If you want a test database to reproduce the problem and don't want to use your own backup, just use the dummy database from the Vanilla documentation. You need as much discussions and comments (and users!) as you can.
There was an error rendering this rich post.
this is interesting. DO you know SQL? You could get the DiscussionID of one and then query the comments, to see if they are indeed missing.
e.g.
Select * FROM GDN_Comment where DiscussionID=267;if it return any results, what does it say in Format Column?
if you see here
http://www.heapershangout.com/index.php?p=/discussion.json/267/our-dreams/p1
the Format is Deleted
grep is your friend.