The discussion revolves around a bug where deleting a user who created a topic results in the first post (and thus the entire topic) being deleted, making it unrecoverable through the UI. Nick_Shearer_nsheare reports that deleting a user accidentally caused the topic’s first post to be marked as deleted, and even reassigning the topic to a new user didn’t restore it. They manually fixed it via the API, highlighting the need for a UI solution. Mittineague notes that the first post is essentially the topic, and suggests the issue might stem from deleting the user rather than the post directly. jomaxro confirms that deleting a user deletes all their posts and topics, and the current system lacks a way to undelete such topics. Nick_Shearer_nsheare reiterates that while API workarounds exist, they’re impractical for regular moderators. jomaxro agrees the UX should support this recovery. Mittineague proposes a solution: if the deleted post is the first, the system should delete the topic instead. k4rtik confirms experiencing the same issue. bloomexperiment notes the issue has since been resolved, with topics now recoverable by changing ownership to the system user.
We had a moderator accidentally delete a user who posted a topic instead of the one who posted spam at the end of it… aside from the badness of not being able to undo deleting the user this caused the first post of the topic (i.e the topic itself) to end up in a deleted state. assigning the topic to a new user left the first post in the topic in the deleted state with no way to recover.
the lil trash can icon under the post would let me delete the entire thread and then the undelete icon would come up and let me undelete the whole thread. after doing that the first post was still stuck in the deleted state.
I ended up undeleting the first post manually via the api which fixed the problem.
however it would be nice if it was possible to fix this via the UI. i.e the undelete button should probably have been available on the first post when the thread was not deleted but the first post was. if that isn’t reasonable perhaps undeleting a thread should also undelete the first post in the thread if it is in a deleted state.
In many ways, the first post of a topic is the topic.
When a first post of a topic is spam, I usually delete using the topic wrench as opposed to the post wrench. I have noticed that other moderators at times delete by using the post wrench on the first post, but have not noticed any ill effects. It sounds like you may have uncovered a problem. (possibly a can of worms)
Can you list the exact steps needed to reproduce this?
I’m not entirely sure what the moderator did. All I know is that the log shows the post+user being deleted. possibly deleting the user caused the post to be deleted?
Yes, deleting a user will cause all posts and topics by the user to be deleted - topics must be associated with a user.
This is a strange state for a topic to be in, and at the moment there doesn’t appear to be a way to undelete the topic. Even changing post ownership then attempting to undelete doesn’t work.
Other than UX changes, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to have the admin-user deleteAllPosts check to see if the post number is the first and delete the topic instead when it is the OP
