Bulk un-deletion

[rahim123]

Continuing the discussion from Best way to temporarily remove public access to a user's topics?:

Would it be possible to enable a bulk un-delete selector in the /u/username/deleted-posts list? From what I can tell it would require a technically very challenging and potentially dangerous SQL/rails script to undelete them programatically.

For this feature to be most useful it would be best to differentiate between deleted topics and deleted replies. Maybe the existing /u/username/deleted-posts URL could be maintained, and then add to that /u/username/deleted-posts/topics and /u/username/deleted-posts/replies .

[rahim123]

@pfaffman

You’re not going to get a feature in time.

It shouldn’t be that hard to bulk move them all to a private category as a edit in rails and later revert those edits.

The topics are already deleted, and I don’t have an estimate for when the user might request restoration of the topics, so I guess I can wait for bulk un-deletion to be implemented. I don’t think I’m the only one that would find it useful, there are quite a few posts here requesting help for doing so.

This also looks like a potentially easier and safer way to programmatically un-delete, assuming I can figure out how to generate the list of the user’s deleted topic IDs:

Bulk undelete topics

There is no “undelete” bulk action that I know of, so you’ll need to write a script for this and use the Discourse API. Everything you do in Discourse you can do through the API, check this topic to learn how How to reverse engineer the Discourse API As instructed in the topic, if you check your network tab (in your browser’s dev tools), you’ll see that whenever the “reverse delete” button is clicked, there is a PUT call made to /posts/<post-id>/recover [Screen Shot 2021-07-12 at 19.05.37] S…

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

This will find deleted topics created by user_id 1.

dts=Topic.with_deleted.where(user_id: 1).where("deleted_at is not null");
dts.pluck(:deleted_at, :id)

dps=Post.with_deleted.where(user_id: 1).where("deleted_at is not null");
dbs.pluck(:deleted_at, :id)

And it looks like you can un-delete posts with something like

dp=dps.first
dp.deleted_at=nil
dp.deleted_by=nil
dp.save

And you’d do something similar for topics.

If it comes time to un-delete the stuff, the above should be enough for someone who knows a tiny bit about rails to be able to un-delete them all.

FWIW, if you had moved them to a hidden category, it would have been perhaps somewhat easier to bulk-revert-to-last-revision them all. But when neither of those things is possible for you at all, I think that’s a distinction without a difference.

Lastly, I’ll apologize for once again, treating a feature request as support . I think I do it because I have no power to make features, but I can solve problems.

[rahim123]

Not a problem at all Jay, really appreciate it. Of course I would prefer if a GUI method could be implemented in Discourse, but if not I really appreciate you walking me through that.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

@rahim123

Of course I would prefer if a GUI method could be implemented in Discourse

It’s certainly an edge case, but we try to keep track when a feature is asked multiple times (especially from customers) to have a better idea of when to move forward