Merged topics are no longer being bumped

Bug
1

A bug seems to have worked its way in to 3.6.0.beta2-latest (e2eb9fe93f) which wasn’t present in the previous updates I made last week.

My update diff, if it helps: Comparing 31701bd722b635300511e9743edb40b1133ff866...e2eb9fe93f8a338df6981bae0b378f9c9eb57555 · discourse/discourse · GitHub

There is an issue when merging topics.

Previously, the topic I merge in to would get bumped.

This is no longer happening and both topics now vanish from sight.

Here’s the original topic I merged, 21 mins ago:

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Head over to /latest and you can see the closed topic, but no sign of the topic I merged it in to :person_shrugging:

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Similarly, heading over to the Travel category, no sign of the topic being bumped here either :person_shrugging:

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If I go to the topic that I merged in to, then Reset Bump Date, it magically appears in /latest at the the correct timestamp of the last post that was merged in to it.

This issue does not seem to occur if I merge and tick the box to preserve the chronological order.

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I’ve tried both staff and moderator accounts, can replicate every time with both account types.

1 Like
2

I suspect it’s related to this :thinking:

2 Likes
3

Just to clarify the issue here with a scenario.

  • User creates new topic called “Topic XYZ”
  • Staff merge that new topic in to an existing topic called “ABC Topic”
    – Standard housekeeping to prevent duplicate topics
  • “Topic XYZ” has now vanished from public view because it’s been unlisted and merged
  • “ABC Topic” isn’t visible in /latest (or anywhere else recently) because it hasn’t been bumped
  • No users are even aware that a new topic / post was ever created (or what is now technically a reply to an older topic because it was merged) because it’s been moved to a topic that might be a year old and wasn’t bumped

Not sure how well I’m explaining that :blush:

2 Likes
4

Yes, I think you’re describing the problem well.

@christo I think we need to consider a few different combinations here:

Given we’re merging topic A (a single post) into topic B, there are the following cases to consider

    1. topic A’s post in newer than the last post of topic B
    • a. maintain chronology is selected
    • b. maintain chronology is not selected
    1. topic A’s post is older than the last post of topic B
    • c. maintain chronology is selected
    • d. maintain chronology is not selected

I think the expected behavior is that the topic is bumped in all cases, except for 2(c).

In every case but 2(c), the post from topic A would be appended at the end of topic B, so I think the merge should cause the bump date to be set based on when the merge occurred.

I’m not exactly sure what I’d expect to happen though in the case of 2(d), if the admin later does “reset bump date”. I think it should probably update the bump date to be the date of the most recently created post in the topic (e.g. the penultimate post).

@martin you and I have been thinking about bump date logic in other scenarios – does the above make sense to you?

1 Like
6

Yes, based solely on it always having been this way until the updates I installed this week.

Again, the issue we now have is that new topics/posts simply vanish in to thin air as they’re no longer bumping the topic they were merged in to – where they always have in the past.

I’d agree.

1 Like