Major problem with forum ...

[pulkit]

Thank god for the Deleted Topics board !!

I ran a sitemap making utility on my site from auditmypc.com (HATE putting a link to those #$%$%&^$% so I won't type it correctly  :  http ://w ww.audit mypc. com/free- sitemap-gener ator.asp) and it nearly completely destroyed my entire forum !!!

1000 posts out of 2300 (approx figures) were located in the Deleted Posts section. Threads were split into posts and stored there ... My and my Global Mod sat down and restored the individual posts to correct boards, merged topics, stickied and locked (yes, even that was messed around with) threads for a whole 7 hours !!!

Not just that, all the pics in SMF Gallery lite suddenly became unapproved, and members got powers they were never supposed to have and lost the rights available to even guests !! (This did not happen, it was incorrectly reported to me by a mod)

In short, there's hardly anything that the spider spared on my forum ... Now, my forum is approx 200 posts short of yesterday's number and I have lost some of my best articles that I had put up links to on the mainpage of my site (The spider took care of them first). This just leaves me with 3 questions ...

I have a backup from 21st April, 2007 ... Is it advisable to use that to restore my forum using that ?? Won't it delete the posts made since then ??

Can I use this backup to get old posts to my test forum ?? If yes, then I can salvage more from the current situation and atleast get some of my articles back ...

Is there any way that a post made later in the thread be shown as it had been made earlier, say, at the beginning of thread. That's because some of the threads now begin with a reply instead of the initial post ...

Please help me out in whatever way you think is possible. My site's members have not been able to access the site for approx 10 hours now (maintainence mode) and if I go back with 200 posts missing, they are going to kill me ... These are savage bikers !!

[Dragooon]

Someone (probably admin) must have started it bcuz to create a racket like that is almost impossible for someone as a normal guests.
Now as we come of posts which are deleted those cannot be restored unless you have a backup.
You can restore your backup in a test forum.

[pulkit]

I am the Admin of the forum and I know that all that I did was to allow the stupid site (auditmypc.com) to make a sitemap ... I was logged in at the time when the sitemap was being generated ...

How do I restore the backup to the test forum ?? I read the docs for restoring the backup and found that it needs to be done through phpAdmin ... I can't mess with phpAdmin, it'll restore the forum to 14th April, causing old posts to be recovered at the cost of losing all posts since ... I don't want to do that !!

[Dragooon]

okokokokok
I cannot get you.
What do you exactly want??
If you want to restore a backup to your test forums upload the DB to your PhPMyAdmin and correct the settings(Use Repair_settings.php)

[pulkit]

It says here that I must restore the same database to the same server. That means it will restore the same forum causing it to lose posts made later than the backup date ... That's what I don't want ...

And it says here that repair_settings.php should only be used if the forum is inaccessible. In my case, the forum is accessible but I have put it on Maintenance mode ...

[SlammedDime]

In looking at that site and program, I fail to see how it directly messed up your forum...  Can you provide any insight as to what happened?

On a side note, check out http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=755

[Fiery]

Hello,

There is no reason that a bot or someone else would be able to do all of that, unless they had privileges to do so.

Restoring an old database file will cause you to lose all posts since the database was made, unless you manually copy the changes from one database to the other.

Manual editing of the database is not the easiest thing in the world, but there are some posts about doing different things manually.