A former admin has left the company and I am trying to merge his old account into his personal account and encountering errors: rake users:merge['source','target'] rake aborted! ArgumentError: ArgumentError /var/www/discourse/app/services/post_owner_changer.rb:10:in `initialize' /var/www/discourse/app/services/user_merger.rb:60:in `new' /var/www/discourse/app/services/user_merger.rb:60:in `change_post_owner' /var/www/discourse/app/services/user_merger.rb:48:in `block in move_posts' /var/www/discourse/app/services/user_merger.rb:46:in `each' /var/www/discourse/app/services/user_merger.rb:46:in `move_posts' /var/www/discourse/app/services/user_merger.rb:11:in `merge!' /var/www/discourse/lib/tasks/users.rake:48:in `block in ' /usr/local/bin/bundle:23:in `load' /usr/local/bin/bundle:23:in ` ' Tasks: TOP => users:merge (See full trace by running task with --trace)

My guess is that some of the posts are in topics that only an admin can write and or read. He won’t be able to access those posts if he is not an admin. You might be able to do it the other way. Merge the non admin account into the admin account, then rename the admin account to the non admin account, then remove the admin privileges. He will still get “Oops” on topics in categories that he no longer has access to.

[image] Jim.Morrison: ArgumentError: ArgumentError This suggests that the users could not be found. [image] Jim.Morrison: rake users:merge[‘source’,‘target’] Did you enter the command exactly like this? You need to replace ‘source’ and ‘target’ with the appropriate usernames.

[image] david: [image] Jim.Morrison: rake users:merge[‘source’,‘target’] Did you enter the command exactly like this? You need to replace ‘source’ and ‘target’ with the appropriate usernames. That would produce another error by the rake task: “ERROR: User with username source does not exist” To me it looks like the database is corrupt and contains posts with topic ids of non-existent topics.

i don’t think this is a corrupt database per se. I have seen many kind-of-legit cases where changing post ownership fails , especially where the destination user has less privileges than the original user.

I replaced the arguments that are sensitive with placeholders ‘source’, ‘target’. I don’t believe the database is corrupt as it would bring on a whole new slew of issues but is there any way I can check off hand? [image] michaeld: I have seen many kind-of-legit cases where changing post ownership fails , especially where the destination user has less privileges than the original user. This would definitely be the case as we are merging a previous admin account into a basic user account. Further more, I removed all admin abilities and mod privileges and tried to merge the accounts again with no success.

You can run the following code in the rails console (rails c) to find the offending posts. I’ll leave it up to you what you do with them. source_user = User.find_by_username(" "); Post.with_deleted. where(user_id: source_user.id). where("NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM topics WHERE posts.topic_id = topics.id)")

Hey there, what in the returned error leads you to suspect the source username is the source of the issues? Just trying to understand better. Thanks!

Because it fails in line 10 of post_owner_changer.rb (this is where posts are moved from the source to the target user) and the only object that can be nil at that place is @topic. That leads me to believe that you have at least one post with a topic_id that points to a missing topic in the database. app/services/post_owner_changer.rb 84a10f821 @post_ids = params[:post_ids] @topic = Topic.with_deleted.find_by(id: params[:topic_id].to_i) @new_owner = params[:new_owner] @acting_user = params[:acting_user] @skip_revision = params[:skip_revision] || false raise ArgumentError unless @post_ids && @topic && @new_owner && @acting_user

Looking at this here with @Jim.Morrison and it’s listing out some topic IDs which pull up “Ooops! That page doesn’t exist or is private”… We did a migration with @pfaffman about a year ago and I am wondering if some of these are a result of that? Do we just need to do a rake task that can be run to rebuild / remap titles?

I suggest you either delete the posts via PostDestroyer.new(Discourse.system_user, post).destroy or update the topic_id with the ID of a new topic. You’d also need to make sure that the post_number is unique in that topic. Deleting is probably easier and I guess you don’t need them otherwise you’d have missed them already. :wink:

If a topic can be moved to an area that the users can’t see why would it fail when re-attributing posts?

Rake users:merge on former admin account throws error

Product Support

gerhard (Gerhard Schlager) February 8, 2019, 9:04pm 3

That would produce another error by the rake task:

“ERROR: User with username source does not exist”

To me it looks like the database is corrupt and contains posts with topic ids of non-existent topics.

Topic		Replies	Views
Issue merging user accounts, web interace and rake console Product Support merge-user	10	635	May 14, 2025
Users:merge returning an error on `can_delete_user` Bug merge-user	0	354	March 14, 2023
Merge users not possible from UI or CLI Product Support merge-user	2	618	May 14, 2025
Rake task for merging users Announcements new-feature , merge-user	61	15118	August 12, 2022
Rake users:merge fails to delete user with small posts Bug merge-user	1	720	January 19, 2019

Rake users:merge on former admin account throws error

Related topics