Site Users Being Mistakenly Deleted?

MechaKrauser 2017-02-12 17:08:55 UTC #1

I noticed that some tabs are blank under the "Tabber" column and also on the "Submitted by" section of the tab's page. I remember archard saying that a script would delete users who have been inactive for a certain length of time so it didn't seem strange on the old tabs.

But I noticed this recent tab doesn't have a submitter and was wondering if they might have been mistakenly deleted.

archard 2017-02-19 04:36:26 UTC #2

Thanks for reporting this. Yeah, it was due to the script. I had it set to delete inactive users, which was defined by users who had never made at least one post or comment. I'm not sure why some tabbers got deleted, but I guess the script must have been overly-aggressive. I've turned it off, as the spam problem is no not such a big issue. We'll have to see what we can do to restore those accounts....

Jacob31593 2017-02-19 07:03:34 UTC #3

do you have any backups of the site that we can use to cross reference the authorless tabs with

MechaKrauser 2017-02-19 07:58:09 UTC #4

Would it help to make a list of all the tabs that are affected? Someone may recognize the tab and know the author through another site like facebook or youtube.

It'll be time-comsuming, but you can browse for authorless tabs without checking each individual game sub-page using the tuning sub-page, The EADGBE tuning page has 5755 tabs listed, and you can see a few affected tabs right on the first page.

archard 2017-02-19 08:24:28 UTC #5

I do have backups, but the data is very hard to sift through because it's just raw SQL statements. I'll try and figure out a way to get the data easily

archard 2017-02-19 08:29:05 UTC #6

You can actually see the list very easily if you go to https://www.gametabs.net/all-tabs and then sort by Tabber

Jacob31593 2017-02-19 08:43:04 UTC #7

so looks like its only 322 tabs

MechaKrauser 2017-02-19 09:54:35 UTC #8

Ah, I didn't know that page existed I just went by what was on the left sidebar and the affected tabs didn't show up under "By Tabber".

archard 2017-02-19 10:00:36 UTC #9

Yeah and I think there were a number of them that were already orphaned for other reasons as well.

archard 2017-03-11 05:40:48 UTC #10

Update on this. So it turns out I only have access to backups going back about a month, which means that I don't have access to all the data I need to restore the deleted users. I did the best I could with the data I had available, and was able to restore about 140 deleted users. The rest of the users will have to message me if they want to have their account restored and relinked with their tabs.

archard 2017-03-11 05:42:34 UTC #11

Looks like there are 84 tabs still orphaned. So, a significant chunk was restored, but not everything. Still pretty good though

MechaKrauser 2017-03-11 07:44:40 UTC #12

That's good news I guess there's nothing more we can do but wait for the others to come back and claim their tabs.

archard 2017-03-11 07:46:06 UTC #13

Yeah. It's unfortunate but stuff happens sometimes. And it's just 84 out of 7363 tabs... 1.1%