Question "Restore Default Settings" wiped configuration. How do I restore from a site backup?

Not exactly sure who or how, but it would appear the "Restore Default Settings" button was activated on our site.

I have a site backup from a few hours ago -- where is the INI file or config file I can restore?

Thanks in advance,
Jon

The configuration settings are stored in the database.

I think that the question you really need to answer is, "what damage has been done?". Kunena will work - it should work - quite well even if you only use the default settings. Some things may not work quite as well as you might like them to work (but that's a different issue). In my own case (and in the case of how Kunena operates here at this website) I only change about 3 or 4 settings. One of those settings is the Forum Title; another one is the Forum E-mail Address.

So, even if someone may have used the Restore Default Settings button, your forum should continue to work. My advice is to change as little as possible or, if you must change anything, change one thing at a time and see what happens after you make each change.

If you must restore the database, you need to extract the table kunena_config from a backup. Before you tamper with the database, please read How To Destroy your forum data...

I hope this information helps.

Thanks, I was afraid that'd be the answer.

Unfortunately, one of the settings that were lost was the forum available to "Registered Users Only" so our forum went public for about 20 minutes. Not good...

We have a LOT of config changes as well.

Also, though more of an annoyance, we've done custom Kunena template work that went away until the problem was found. The users could read the forum but only barely (grey font on white background) in the custom template over our site template is hard to see.


I'd like to see a way to turn off the Restore Default Settings -- it's a land mine in our case, being right next to the "Save" button.

Thanks for the reply

jon.m wrote: Unfortunately, one of the settings that were lost was the forum available to "Registered Users Only" so our forum went public for about 20 minutes. Not good...

Perhaps it's not good, but I think you will have to agree that it's easy to fix.

jon.m wrote: We have a LOT of config changes as well.

Now that is not good! As we have often said in here, unless you have very specific needs (and as long as you understand what each configuration setting does) there should not be a great need to make wholesale changes. However, I do understand your pain if you made a lot of changes.

With some Joomla extensions (those that I feel the need to make many changes with) I usually print a screen dump of the settings after I'm happy with them and I file them away somewhere safe. I usually mark on those printed pages, with a highlighting pen, the changes I've made. In this way, if the upgrade procedure blows away my configuration changes, I have a record of what I need to do. Fortunately, though, the Kunena upgrade process does not destroy the configuration settings that you've put in place.

The Restore Default Settings feature is meant to be a "fail-safe", in the event that you've made so many changes (and you can't remember what they were), as a quick way of getting back to something that works. Yes, it's arguable that, in the hands of someone who doesn't know what they're doing, someone could damage the forum configuration. Yes, it could be useful to disable the feature; it might also be useful to educate your fellow site administrator of the dangers involved in doing things without carefully checking what they're doing. It's a tough juggling act.

I know, in my own case, I've accidentally pressed the wrong "button" (e.g. on the front-end, I've pressed Edit when I meant to press Quote and the result has been that I've erased someone else's posting on the forum ... much to my acute embarrassment) because buttons that control different functions are located next to one another. All of this discussion aside, we sympathise with your dilemma but "the horse has already bolted" and our job now is to corral it back home again and restore your forum back to normal operations (or as close as we can do so). As I wrote earlier, if you have a safe backup of your site (with the database as it was before the damage occurred) you could extract the kunena_config table. On the other hand, it may be just as quick for you to work your way, item by item, through the configuration that you now have and make educated guesses as to what you should do.

Short answer: no, I don't know how to turn off this feature (not without examining the PHP code that "drives" it).

Thanks, sozzled.

We have a lot of config changes cause that's what it takes to (a) make migration to Kunena an easy transition for 2,000 registered users comfortable with an old forum style, and (b) manage a forum that is not accessible to unregistered users.

Visibility to the outside world is a MAJOR problem for this forum, by the way. I may just go digging into the administrator side scripts in order to disable that "Restore" feature! As I didn't witness the action I don't know what form of acknowledgement is prompted... I can only presume that is the action that caused our forum config to be lost.

Thanks again. Jon

I tested the Restore Default Settings feature. There is no confirmatory dialog that occurs between "pressing the button" and the action that follows. But, as I've written several times above, the action is not (in a commonly-understood sense) a total disaster. No data is lost, your users will still be able to use the forum, everything will continue to work ... but things will work in a less-than-desired fashion. If people need to make substantial changes to [any] software configuration then appropriate safeguards need to be taken to preserve what those changes were (so that they can be reapplied as necessary). I have mentioned a few ways how you can do that.

Our primary objective here, in a self-help forum like this one, is to get your forum back up and running again as quickly as possible. We can, afterwards, review the disaster recovery procedures to identify what lessons should be learnt from the incident and apply those lessons to the site management plan (as I believe you are now trying to do). Also, from the point that Kunena is a community-driven software project, the members of the development team need to hear these kinds of stories, too.

jon.m wrote:

... custom Kunena template work that went away until the problem was found. The users could read the forum but only barely (grey font on white background) in the custom template over our site template is hard to see.

That issue has nothing to do with the Restore Default Settings feature. I don't have an explanation for why that happened.

Which file did you change when you made those custom changes? Surely, you didn't apply those customised changes to the originally installed Kunena template CSS files, did you? :ohmy: