The issue discusses a bug where applying bulk operations (such as changing categories or tags) to search results in a category does not affect the intended topics. markcoley reports that using the ‘Select All’ function within search results causes unrelated topics to be moved or tagged instead of the searched topics. The problem appears to stem from a mismatch between the selected search results and the topics actually processed by the bulk actions. markcoley notes that manually selecting topics works correctly, suggesting the issue is specific to the ‘Select All’ functionality in search contexts. SaraDev attempted to reproduce the bug but could not, concluding that the issue may have been resolved in later updates. However, the original user’s experience indicates a persistent problem with bulk actions in search results.
I have a category with hundreds of topics in, and regularly there is a topic with “in the news” in the title along with the date. I have been trying to select all these posts and move them to a new subcategory called ‘News’.
I can successfully search for all the posts with “in the news” in the title, which are all in a certain category. I can then select all of them from the search results screen, and when I then try to ‘Set Category…’ in Bulk Actions for all these posts, and move them to another category, I find that it is other posts that appear in this category, not the ones that were selected as a result of running the search. The topics that move have no connection to the search results. It’s as if the list of search results is ignored and different topics are moved! I’ve tried rebuilding the app but nothing changed. If I manually select all the posts from outside the search screen I can do a bulk move to put them back in the original category, it’s just if I select the posts from the search results screen that the change of category doesn’t work properly and other random posts get moved category instead.
If I use the search function, as above, and instead of selecting all posts with one button press I just manually select the first 50 or so topics, then set the new subcategory in bulk, it works. The search results instantly update to show that new subcategory has been applied too.
The fault is to do with select all, it must, somehow behind the scenes, be getting confused with which posts form the complete list.
The same problem occurs if you select all then try to apply a tag. Posts which weren’t in the search results get tagged erroneously too and they appear to be the same ones that would get the wrong category applied.
To recreate try creating a new subcategory then searching for posts in the main category and bulk changing the category for all these using select all. See if just these posts move. You can move the posts back by viewing that subcategory outside the search environment, then selecting all and bulk applying the old category. This part of select all seems to work, it’s just the select all inside the search functionality that doesn’t do the right thing.
Checking back on this, I tried to reproduce the bug described here with a variety of topics selected via search through the bulk actions menu, but was I unable to get this behavior.
Selecting searched topics with the “Select All” button, and then using the bulk actions menu to change the categories or tags of the topics successfully changed the categories or tags of all topics each time I tested this.
I also did not experience this with any of the topics I tested.
Based on this testing, you should no longer be experiencing this bug anymore.