I just deleted the systemnews/help page! I wrote the post below in preview mode on that page originally. When I switched to "regular post," the post and everything preceding it disappeared. I hope it's all retrievable.
I don't want to say it's impossible, but I can't think of any way you could actually erase content using the web interface to the system (this was one of the big improvements over the old system.) So it was no problem to fix. Nothing ever gets erased, it just gets marked as deleted in the database, and so its simple to go back in and flip the deleted bit. I was going to build a script so that a user could "empty the trash" and actually erase stuff that had merely been marked as deleted, but I never got around to it. And I'm not sure I ever will. The amount of space occupied by the trash is rather minor, and having the script which actually erases stuff seems sort of dangerous.
Anyway, this happened because that page has a window of '0', or in other words, it has no archive - everything posted to the page stays viewable on the page. But the edit script was not quite smart enough. It assumed some value for the page window, so when turning a post from a preview into a regular post the edit script tries to "retire" into the archive one post from the other end of the window. In this case the window was 0, so it retired everything into the archive. But also, there is no archive for that page, so you couldn't "page back" to this incorrectly "retired" content. Fun fun fun.
I've fixed it so this will not happen again. Possibly the same problem will crop up with pending posts. I'll have to make sure that is working correctly as well.
We are finding a lot of bugs lately. Excellent. Thanks.
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- tom moody 11-25-2001 5:29 pm
I don't want to say it's impossible, but I can't think of any way you could actually erase content using the web interface to the system (this was one of the big improvements over the old system.) So it was no problem to fix. Nothing ever gets erased, it just gets marked as deleted in the database, and so its simple to go back in and flip the deleted bit. I was going to build a script so that a user could "empty the trash" and actually erase stuff that had merely been marked as deleted, but I never got around to it. And I'm not sure I ever will. The amount of space occupied by the trash is rather minor, and having the script which actually erases stuff seems sort of dangerous.
Anyway, this happened because that page has a window of '0', or in other words, it has no archive - everything posted to the page stays viewable on the page. But the edit script was not quite smart enough. It assumed some value for the page window, so when turning a post from a preview into a regular post the edit script tries to "retire" into the archive one post from the other end of the window. In this case the window was 0, so it retired everything into the archive. But also, there is no archive for that page, so you couldn't "page back" to this incorrectly "retired" content. Fun fun fun.
I've fixed it so this will not happen again. Possibly the same problem will crop up with pending posts. I'll have to make sure that is working correctly as well.
We are finding a lot of bugs lately. Excellent. Thanks.
- jim 11-25-2001 6:22 pm [add a comment]