Question Misleading Data in table, deleted categories still exist

Hello,

I've recently launched this website ( www.interview7.com ) and implemented Kunena after reading a lot of reviews. About a week back I uploaded the website on my webhosting server. The site is fresh and doesn't have any content as of now. I'm still in the process of adding content.

Part1
On day 1, I created following categories, forum and child forums in kunena forum administration:

General
-- HR

Software Testing (This is the main category)
-- General/Manual Testing (Forum)
-- Automation/Testing Tools (Forum)

---

QTP, Winrunner (Child Forums)

---

Quality Center, Test Director

---

Loadrunner

---

Rational Robot

---

Silktest

---

Selenium

Database
-- Oracle
-- SQL Server
-- MySql
-- Others

Unfortunately, while working on forum administration, I deleted one of the main categories ie "Software Testing". This also deleted all forum and child forums under this.

Part2
So I recreated following categories with one child forum (Rational Robot) removed and few name changes, as you can see yourself. The numbers in the bracket are their IDs from attached file Table.gif.

Software Testing (17)
-- Manual Testing (18)
-- Automation Testing (19)

---

QTP, Winrunner (20)

---

Quality Center, Test Director (22)

---

Loadrunner (23)

---

Silktest (24)

---

Selenium (25)

Today, I posted two threads under "QTP, Winrunner" but I found that it didn't show the thread count correctly. While searching for threads on kunena forums to resolve this, I found another problem. When I'm on the main page where all categories are listed, I see all the categories (with forums and childs) from "Part2". However, when I click the category "Software Testing" from this page to see its details, I see all forums with their childs listed from "Part1", which is really strange. When I deleted those categories by mistake last time, I expected that they would have been removed from the database. So, today I went to the database and got this table info (see table.gif). I matched all current categories and found that the deleted categories(with forum and childs) are still present. And this is what is being shown on the website. These forums and child aren't even listed in kunena forum administration anymore. You can go on the website yourself and see how it looks.

I run a parallel copy on my local machine where this problem doesn't exist. It shows correct categories, correct forums, correct childs on all pages. Not only that, it showed the thread count correctly which I found surprising because I read on one of the threads here on kunena that it's a known issue.

Please help. I'm really stuck with this major problem. I really like kunena and don't want to go to other forums. I tried CCBoard and Agora before choosing this one.

Sorry for writing such a long thread. Just wanted to be as detailed as possible. BTW, I tried "Recounting Categories" in kunena forum administration, it didn't change a thing.

ritesh_z wrote:

When I deleted those categories by mistake last time, I expected that they would have been removed from the database. So, today I went to the database and got this table info (see table.gif). I matched all current categories and found that the deleted categories(with forum and childs) are still present. And this is what is being shown on the website. These forums and child aren't even listed in kunena forum administration anymore. You can go on the website yourself and see how it looks.

Yes, the underlying issue in all of this has to do with understanding the relationship between parent and child categories. As soon as you delete a parent category you create "orphans" of the children. This problem occurs frequently, because people don't fully appreciate the relational aspects of categories, and people easily fall into major difficulties when they unknowingly make relatively insignificant changes. I think we all agree that this is an area of Kunena that should have been better designed at it's unfortunate that people continue to suffer the consequences of this design fault now. Perhaps, one day in the future, Kunena might be made bullet-proof? :lol:

The key to understanding what has happened is to familiarise yourself with concepts explained in Sections, Categories, sub-Categories (Part 1) .

The way out of your quagmire is to create a new section and then repair the relationship of the orphaned categories using phpMyAdmin. I realise that I haven't explained in fine detail all of the steps involved - that's because we don't encourage our users to mess around with SQL because they can do more damage than they can do good - but that's generally what you need to do. You need to reassign the parent-id of the orphaned categories to a new parent. After you do that, all those categories will be accessible to Kunena.

Thanks Sozzled for quick reply.

What you've written makes sense. I was looking through all the tables created by Kunena in phpmyadmin and found that CatIDs are linked only in following tables:

Categories
Moderation(empty)
Messages(doesn't have anything with wrong CatIDs)

I think it wouldn't be problematic (now and in future) if I delete all rows with categories that don't exist anymore from the "Categories" table itself. Realignment of CatIDs isn't required because current categories aren't linked with any of old CatIDs.

What do you think?

ritesh_z wrote:

I think it wouldn't be problematic (now and in future) if I delete all rows with categories that don't exist anymore from the "Categories" table itself. Realignment of CatIDs isn't required because current categories aren't linked with any of old CatIDs.

What do you think?

Aside from not clearly understanding what you mean by "all rows with categories" I think it is always better to re-establish the forum in such a way that you can use the standard features built into Kunena to administer things.

Before I would delete any categories or sections I would first find "homes" for any discussion topics that I had that might reside there. Then I would next look at any categories within categories and dispose of those, too, in an appropriate way ... and then I'd look at what I wanted to do with any sections that remain after that.

BINGO!

What a relief!!!

Sorry for using wrong terminology in last post even after reading about sections, categories and sub-cats. Well, I deleted all Sub-Cats first, then the Categories and then the Sections, all children first and parents thereafter.

The forum looks good now and it shows all the correct things on all pages. Not only that, it's counting the child threads too, correctly.

You made my day. You're my hero.

Thank you so much for this quick resolution.