Important Inverse merge - what have I done?!

Hi,

I was trying to tidy up some posts and I've inverse merged a post, which has wiped the entire topic :ohmy: So now it says that there are 0 topics, xyz replies and 0 posts. It was a really important thread so I'm gutted - what does the inverse merge function do/where did the posts go, and is there any way I can get them back?

Any help would be so much appreciated!

It looks like you've found a bug which I wasn't aware of.

All the messages are in there, so you didn't loose anything. Now we just need to look into database and check what went wrong..

Can you find the thread from the database? You need to remember it's topic or something and do a search in phpmyadmin. Once you find the topic, search all messages in it. First message should have parent=0. It's the most common reason why topic disappear. Another common issue is that you moved the topic into a section. That is a container for categories and cannot contain any messages. There was a bug in < K1.5.12 which allowed this to happen. So check that catid is same as in the category where the message should be.

I hope this helps you! If not, don't hesitate to ask for help.

Thankyou so much! I didn't expect such a quick reply - I'm very grateful. After I posted I went and looked in the database and saw that all the messages I was missing now had their parents set to 0, so I just set them back to what they should've been and it's all fine! Maybe it's not a bug, just me being stupid. I still don't know what that inverse merge is meant for! :laugh: Thanks again for such a quick reply.

There should be only one post in a thread with parent=0. If there's anything else, it's a bug.

Can you give us your Kunena version and general instruction how you managed to do this?

Sure - I'm using Kunena 1.5.6

What happened was that I had been merging some threads into a topic they should've been in. Then on one of the posts I clicked "inverse merge" instead of "merge" (and opted to not have a ghost copy), and after that the entire contents of the topic disappeared. The topic was still listed in the forum but with 0 posts (although the replies were still counted but not available). If I managed to find the posts via the search facility, clicking on it would bring up the "invalid id" message.

Oh, this was known issue until 1.5.8-9 or something.. When you left ghost message, you would sometimes (often?) hit SQL syntax error. There were also issues with merge, which sometimes broke threads. Try to avoid using merge in K1.5.6 -- we had to disable it soon after.

Kunena 1.6 has totally rewritten moderation functions which are simple enough to do the right thing.