An apology to CMRancho for an accidental thread deletion...

Community Playground General Discussions
#1

CMRancho,
After a few weeks absence here I was reading one of your threads (about Vera’s appropriateness in HA) and I fat fingered my iPhone and deleted your thread by accident.

It was certainly not my intent to do that, and I’m incredibly sorry for the mistake I’ve made.

I trolled through the SMF (Forums) documentation and there appears no way to restore anything that’s deleted from the Forum system (the one we run at work has a restore function, but apparently not SMF).

Once again, sorry for deleting your thread. I’ll be a lot more careful about using the iPhone to view the forums in future. :frowning:

Guessed.

#2

Total Topics: 1780
Total Posts: 14116
Total Members: 4681

and no backup?

#3

Guessed,
I run an SMF forum, and there is a way as an administrator to send all deleted threads to a specific forum. I enabled it on ours and it works great, even catches ones that people delete themselves.

You have to create a dedicated board for it and goto the admin panel then Forum->Boards->Settings check Enable recycling of deleted topics and select your new board. We call ours The Graveyard and is only visible to moderators and up.

This won’t solve the current problem at hand, but will help if it ever happens again in the future.

#4

@Boyo, thanks for the SMF Tip! I’ve set the Forum to use the “test” Board that the MCV Admin’s use. Posts/Threads deleted from now on will at least be generally recoverable. Pity the horse has bolted, but it looks like Ap15e has a partial.

@Ap15e, I have no idea whether MCV’s team run a Backup of not, but like most things these “whole site” backups are generally only good when you loose the whole site, or have an infrastructure to recover the whole site into in order to retrieve the specific (thread/post) content.

Per-record data deletion and recovery is typically a feature of the product itself, unfortunately the thread/post “recovery” feature in SMF appears to be an option that’s not enabled by default. It’s now been enabled thanks to @Boyo’s help.

#5

I just checked the wayback machine and no go. It seems they don’t archive forums.

#6

Huh… Accident huh?

#7

Hi,

@Chimpware: MCV was not aware of this post deletion. We never deleted any post on this forum, neither good or bad words about us. This is not an external forum about MCV, is in house. We learn and improve with the help of posts like the one deleted by pure accident by a nonMCV employee.

@guessed: good that you enabled that function for deleted posts, in the future it will be possible to restore deleted posts.