Nice thought! When I try deleting my own topic as normal user, the topic does indeed close without a small action post to note the closure (the happens in the code here). If I recover the topic that I had marked for deletion, it does not create a small action post either. This behavior on its own seems fine to me.
The wildcard here seems to be the moderators. I think we need to find out what it is they are doing and why they are doing it.
I have been observing our forum ā it seems like it is related to the original poster deleting the original post. The system doesnāt delete or hide the post for some reason until sometime later. The thread just shows as locked without any system record, leading to confusion.
I am not sure what is causing the issue or whether the locked thread is visible to only high trust level users (TL4). this is a pattern I have been observing.
Hope this helps with debugging!
EDIT: I also notice that none of these locked OPs has any replies. So the post must have been deleted within a short period of time after creation.
If itās the case of the user deleting their own topic then I donāt think this is a bug. You can ādeleteā your own topics as long as there are no replies. It works in a similar way to using the dustbin icon on any of your none-OP posts (first the text is replaced by ādeleted by authorā, and then the post is hidden after 24 hours).
If youāre a normal user and not staff/mod/admin etc then it doesnāt get a small action under it.
Hereās an example Iāve just knocked up on try.discourse.org (though the demo site gets wiped at the end of the day, so it may not still be there by the time you read this )
Iām on UK time (BST), but I wasnāt sure when the demo site gets it daily reset. The topic would have disappeared after 24 hours anyway, so maybe I should have taken a screenshot instead.
Though it turns out I was just repeating something from earlier in the topic anyway, so my bad.
I really need more information to properly dig in to this. Iām willing to try a few more things, but I just donāt have much to go on. I donāt think just looking at a topic as an anon user is going to give me anything useful at this point. You may need to seek out someone in the marketplace that can dig into your logs, site settings, and database to really see whatās going on.
@littleviolette does your site suppress edit history? The screenshot in the OP of this topic does not seem like a self-deleted topic since the content is all there and there is no edit icon next to the timestamp. If it was self-deleted, it should show something like ādeleted by authorā and an edit indication.
@Fabby At this point, Iām unsure if you and littleviolette are experiencing the same thing. You had decided not to look into some of the suggestions based on some of littlevioletteās answers, so Iād like to circle back. Is there any follow up here:
I also would like to know if you use the API or run any integrations with other services.
If you two can give me your best summary of the problem again based on everything youāve observed since the start of this topic, that would be appreciated! Itās getting a little hard to follow everything, so a summary I can refer back to while testing would be awesome.
Currently running 2.8.0.beta4, issue is still happening
Plugins from today:
Name
Version
Enabled?
Discourse-auto-deactivate
Automatically deactivates inactive users so that they need to recomfirm their email in order to login in again
0.0.1
Y
discourse-chat-integration This plugin integrates
discourse with a number of chat providers
0.1
Y
discourse-fingerprint
Computes user fingerprints to help administrators combat internet trolls.
2
Y
discourse-push-notifications
Plugin for integrating Chrome and FireFox push notifications
0.3.0
Y
discourse-solved Add a solved b
utton to answers on Discourse
0.1
Y
discourse-user-notes
Gives the ability for staff members to attach notes to users
0.0.2
Y
docker_managerdocker_manager
Docker manager for Discourse image
0.1
Y
procourse-installer
A Discourse plugin for discovering and installing other Discourse plugins.
0.1
Y
retort
React7ions plugin for Discourse
1.2.3
Y
styleguide
Preview how Widgets are Styled in Discourse
0.2
N
Unlimited edits on first post enabled: issue still happening
If we filter we cannot see anything for that time: no system, no discobot, no mod. (it would be nice if we could filter discobot out!)
I donāt understand what this means: Post a topic there with the problem definition and the above summary asking for someone that can dig into your logs, site settings, and database to really see whatās going on ???
Is there any technical information (HTML / Wiki / PDF manuals; no videoās, please!) available on Discourse that allows us to look into this ourselves because youāre dealing with a bunch of Nerds and Geeks here (With Capitals) and he have PostgreSQL, networking, virtualisation, devs, *nix enigneering, Windows professionals in our mod teamā¦
If you examine the topics table in your database you should be able to figure out the exact moment the topic was closed (for instance by inspecting the updated_at column). You might want to run a script that periodically dumps the contents of the topic table so you can go back in time. If you happen to have set up a Postgresql replication log you might be able to leverage that.
Then you need to find out if there was something that triggered this. This can be either a Sidekiq job (so you need to inspect the Sidekiq job queue to see which jobs ran around that time), a user action (so you need to inspect production.log or the nginx log file) or an external actor (API client, Zapier and such) calling the API (this can also be found in production.log or the nginx log file).
Thank you for the information and if I knew where to look, Iām pretty sure that would be very helpful to me.
Could you please take 3 steps back and give me a link to a document describing step 1, as Iām a moderator on the site and have never installed Discourse and the Manjaro discourse owners are also the Manjaro project leads so pretty busy.
Is being a moderator enough or do I need to be asked to be promoted to owner to dig that deep?
The only things I know about discourse are:
Sam and Code_horror are the founders
It runs on a PostgreSQL back-end (which I have installed / run before)
There is one level up in the hierarchy from moderator and that is Owner
Anyway. I do not have such a document - and if youāre going to need that much hand holding Iām afraid you should follow Taylors suggestion and post in marketplace after all. There is no role āownerā and you will need system level access (so outside of Discourse, on the system itself).
Thank you for circling back and apologies for the delayed response. Here is what we have observed so far:
A topic is shown as locked without any record of the system or a user locking it. Such record cannot be found in Logs either. The mysterious auto-close happens only to topics with only the first post, presumably soon after the post was created based on the screenshot our user has submitted below showing the original post was created 2m ago.
Approximately 1 day after the original post was created, the system deletes the original post. Here are the timestamps of two topics that have been locked without record then subsequently deleted by the system.
Original post created: Aug. 26, 2021 6:34PM
Original post deleted by system: Aug. 27, 2021 6:41PM
Original post created: Jul 31, 2021 5:48PM
Original post deleted by the system: Aug. 01, 2021 6:02PM
This is an example screenshot of the topic that I posted in the OP of this thread today:
We have auto-close topics set up in some categories, but this mysterious auto-close occurs in categories that do not have auto-close timer set up as well;
We do not have solved topics auto close hours set up;
Our mods do not manually add auto-close timers to topics or attempt to manually cancel existing timers;
Topics with this issue are not topics that were moved between categories?
We are running on 2.8.0.beta6, updated 2 days ago. We havenāt had any reporting of this abnormal auto-close behavior recently. I will report back if we see it again.
I spotted two auto-closed threads recently from the same OP without system record. I immediately contacted the OP and asked whether he just deleted the posts and the OP said yes. This happened in a category that does not have an auto-close timer set.
I suspect the issue is related to the OP deleting the first post. However, when I re-opened one of the threads this time, the original post doesnāt get deleted after 24 hours. I am not sure why, but I hope this provide some context for those who have the capability to troubleshoot.
EDIT: It seems that this happens when the user who posted attempts to delete their post. Deleted posts appear locked to outside viewers, without an indication that the post was in fact deleted (and not just locked). The good news is that the person who posted can āunlockā it by undeleting. See the above-linked topic for more details.
Ohh, this is looking very promising! I have had a lot of other things on my plate recently, so I havenāt had a great opportunity to dive back in. Iāll try to give it another go this week. Hopefully I can come up with a definitive repro to pass to the dev team given the great info everyone has shared.
Thanks to everyone thatās helped with trying to figure this one out!
Edit: Ran out of time this week, but have it high up on my list next week.
Would you mind confirming all of the steps you took to reproduce this issue? No detail is too small at this point! Iāve tried many times, many ways to trigger it without success on try.discourse.org. Are you able to trigger it there by chance?
These are the main points Iāve tried from the user side of things:
using the exact topic title and content you did
self-deleting the topic immediately
self-deleting the topic after the edit grace period
both as trust level 0 and 1
selecting a category and tag
In all cases so far, an edit revision appears on the post and the contents are replaced with ā(topic deleted by author)ā
Iām in contact with @szhorvat as well to try to cover the admin side of things, hoping to see if there are any interesting site setting configurations.
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