Hi, anyone clicking my Terms of Service, FAQ or Privacy pages just gets a blank page with a permanently spinning ‘busy’ pointer. How do I correct this? How do I make this information available and bring it to the attention to any potential user who visits the site url, but has yet to sign up for password secured access? Right now a visitor only sees the basic login dialog as the landing page, with no inkling before they sign up as to whether the forum is relevant to them, or what conditions apply. Now that the site and email are all set up and working on the forum domain, I am reluctant to risk messing everything up by redirecting the domain to another separately hosted webpage as the home page, and moving the forum to a subdomain or similar - as I have seen suggested. Also reluctant to spend $47 pa on a paid plugin to add slightly more information to the domain landing page. Are these really my only options?

[image] Paul_King: Can anyone please advise how to reinstate the built in legal topics and IDs (or even just put blank editable posts at the correct /original urls for each built-in legal topic), via postgres, or otherwise? OK, looks like nobody can help with this. Would recreating the forum from scratch help, then restoring saved database backup? Or would restoring the backup just propagate the deletions again?

[image] Paul_King: Or would restoring the backup just propagate the deletions again? I think that it would sorry. Somewhere in that database is the little bit of data that you must change to make those posts appear once more. Here in fact: In the ‘topics’ table, deleted_at will have a timestamp for ID 4, 5, and 6. If you can delete these (replace with nothing / blank) then you will be back in business. I know that you can do this from Ruby/Rails, but that is outside of my skills thusfar - but for someone with the skills it would be a 5 minute job. Perhaps whoever set you up with the instance can help out.

[image] nathank: In the ‘topics’ table, deleted_at will have a timestamp for ID 4, 5, and 6. If you can delete these (replace with nothing / blank) then you will be back in business. Thanks Nathan. Sadly, I set myself up following the official tutorial, with little comprehension. I did have a developer migrate some material in for me early on, and contacted them about this a week ago, but no luck so far getting a response. What I am wondering though is if there is an open source desktop application that connects to and allows viewing and editing of postgre tables in Digital Ocean? Or even that could read and edit a downloaded backup, which I then restore? ** Edit - rereading replies to a similar query, the consensus seems to be to use Ruby if doing anything at all, rather than a friendly looking GUI database application. That said, what are the commands I would issue in PuTTY to access the database and delete the timestamps for topics ID 4,5 and 6 in the topics table deleted_at? (after backup taken)?

[image] nathank: In the ‘topics’ table, deleted_at will have a timestamp for ID 4, 5, and 6. If you can delete these (replace with nothing / blank) then you will be back in business. Hi again - in my lame way, I tried the following query in Data Explorer, and got no relevant hits for messages deleted in the Staff category SELECT * FROM topics WHERE deleted_at is not NULL AND category_id = 3 or even in any category SELECT * FROM topics WHERE deleted_at is not NULL So wondering if there is something else going on if the topics were not deleted?. Is there some other way to detect those missing topics? Or are system posts perhaps not stored in the topics table at all?

Good to see your Data Explorer skills! Those topics are definitely in the topics table. Try this: SELECT id, title, deleted_at FROM topics Order by id Limit 10 You should get something like this: [Screenshot 2020-05-09 at 06.39.37] PS you might also need to change deleted_by_id

Hey @Paul_King, have you tried this? [image] How can I delete or undelete topics? Support Search example.com/latest?status=deleted, find the deleted topic and click the Un-delete button [image]

[image] nathank: Try this: SELECT id, title, deleted_at FROM topics Order by id Limit 10 Thanks Nathan - a great suggestion However the lowest topic ID found amongst deleted topics is 20 [2020-05-09_11h43_22]

Do you have any of 1-10? It appears not. It could be that rebuilding the site from scratch and then merging the databases in some way is the way forwards. Or get hacking that postgres!

How can I delete or undelete topics? Search example.com/latest?status=deleted, find the deleted topic and click the Un-delete button [image] Hi Nathan - that definitely lists a bunch of deleted topics, but none of the pre-seeded ones missing from the staff category

[image] nathank: It could be that rebuilding the site from scratch and then merging the databases in some way is the way forwards. Or get hacking that postgres! I am wondering if I even can hack the database to cancel deletions if there is no sign of the missing pre-seeded posts ever having existed? Is there a way to rerun the setup wizard on an existing installation, to trigger those pre-seeeded posts to be created? Is there some way the setup wizard could have omitted them the first time? (perhaps there was an option where I clicked ‘skip’ the first time round?) Is it possible that there was a bug in play with the then current discourse version at the time I set up? Is it possible that if the missing pre-seeded posts are not even marked as deleted, but simply don’t exist, the absences will not propagate or overwrite anything if I restore backed up database to a fresh Discourse install? Or is it the case that the starting database is removed entirely and replaced by the backup, with all its flaws?

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Product Support

nathank (Nathan Kershaw) May 8, 2020, 8:54pm 23

Hey @Paul_King, have you tried this?

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