Hi everyone.
I absolutely hate to have to break this one, but I did something bad and I need everyone to be aware of what happened.
Earlier today, I was going through the reports, and someone reported one of @hmartin 's posts as spam. It was not. I misclicked and it removed something like 188 of his posts.
Xenforo has a "restore" function, but apparently, his posts were permanently deleted in the process (while likes/ badges and such were not.)
I asked Xenforo support about if there was a way to get posts back via a SQL query or something. We do regular backups so this was something I figured that the XF team would have like a "restore user XYZ items from database X to import into Y.) I was wrong.
As a result, we were basically at the point where every one of his posts, and all of the threads with replies from others on the board were gone.
So the choice was:
1. Leave as-is keeping posts from today around but deleting someone who has been a member since 2017 -or-
2. Restoring from the just after midnight pacific backup of the database and having content restored. This caused about 3-4 minutes of downtime today and removed 10 hours or so of posts.
I made the decision to do the restore. In the process, I opened a browser tab with every public posting today since I know this impacts folks. I will be sending all of the content I have to people via PMs today so it can get reposted.
Thorough apologies to the STH community and especially @hmartin today. This was 100% my fault for clicking the incorrect radio button before drinking coffee. No excuses.
On the plus side, let this be a reminder that this is a good reason to have backups!
I absolutely hate to have to break this one, but I did something bad and I need everyone to be aware of what happened.
Earlier today, I was going through the reports, and someone reported one of @hmartin 's posts as spam. It was not. I misclicked and it removed something like 188 of his posts.
Xenforo has a "restore" function, but apparently, his posts were permanently deleted in the process (while likes/ badges and such were not.)
I asked Xenforo support about if there was a way to get posts back via a SQL query or something. We do regular backups so this was something I figured that the XF team would have like a "restore user XYZ items from database X to import into Y.) I was wrong.
As a result, we were basically at the point where every one of his posts, and all of the threads with replies from others on the board were gone.
So the choice was:
1. Leave as-is keeping posts from today around but deleting someone who has been a member since 2017 -or-
2. Restoring from the just after midnight pacific backup of the database and having content restored. This caused about 3-4 minutes of downtime today and removed 10 hours or so of posts.
I made the decision to do the restore. In the process, I opened a browser tab with every public posting today since I know this impacts folks. I will be sending all of the content I have to people via PMs today so it can get reposted.
Thorough apologies to the STH community and especially @hmartin today. This was 100% my fault for clicking the incorrect radio button before drinking coffee. No excuses.
On the plus side, let this be a reminder that this is a good reason to have backups!