Topic keeps getting deleted

bug
19

Here’s what I came up with:

  1. User creates topic
  2. User deletes topic post, scheduling deletion (I changed the delete_removed_posts_after site setting to 1)
  3. Topic is deleted after specified time
  4. Staff undeletes topic and reverts to the original version of the post (only restoring will bring the post back with the “topic withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 1 hour unless flagged” message)
  5. Topic will re-delete after some time

What’s happening: When a user deletes there own topic post, there is a property called user_deleted that gets set to true. There is a background job called DestroyOldDeletionStubs that runs every 30 minutes. This job runs the PostDestroyer.destroy_stubs function which will search the database and delete any posts that have user_deleted set to true along with an expired “deletion timer.”

The problem: When staff restores the post, user_deleted never gets set to false, so the next time DestroyOldDeletionStubs runs, the post will be re-deleted.

The solution: I’m pretty sure we will need to add some logic to the staff_recovered function that will set user_deleted to false (user_recovered already does this) See https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/lib/post_destroyer.rb

The quick fix: Restore the topic post and get its post ID, then go to your rails console and run:

Post.find_by_id(POST_ID).update(user_deleted: false)

The post ID can be found easily by appending .json to the end of a topic URL. So using this topic as an example: https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-keeps-getting-deleted/128013.json. The topic post ID is 632362.

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