Missing message content and possible fix

[Akira]

Well,
I think I've determined the cause, the fix may work, but not do us any good in one sense.

Seems that each topic, has a database entry for the poster_id (which would be a unique number to your username).

phpBB doesn't know to display message content, if the poster_id is a non-known value. All messages that are not displaying, I believe have a poster_id of -1 which usually indicates a deleted account I think.

Well, in phpMyAdmin, I could do a mass change of the -1 value to a single numeric value for an account, such as my own, the # 3. I think that would display message content, but it will look like I posted all those messages.

I'm just thinking of this in theory, no way of knowing it will work without doing it.

[Serpent]

not sure what OS this is on, but if i had the right permissions, externally.. (i could possibly even write it off-server....)...i could do a small script that did a select and then update based on every single thread, of course it would have to be some kind of loop inside of a loop kinda thing...

when you look at the list of threads inside of each 'forum', as it were.. you see the Author field showing the correct author in each case... so all that you need to do is change the other table to reflect the author (whatever id field is being used there).... make them match....

as far as the idea goes, i think you are onto something, and i think the above idea may be a way to approach it... if you need any help or anything, let me know....

[Akira]

Ok, now I'm confused, but sorta getting your idea.

Forum is on a Windows 2000 server. My concern/issue is not knowing who may have written a particular message? Well, we can certainly see the topic starter, but any responses within, you can't really tell who posted responses.

[Akira]

One guy at phpbb.com has stated that the poster_id field with -1 value, is "guest".

Ugh.

[Baron[CotC]]

Dont mean to sound like a broken record but why dont we just wipe her clean and regroup?

[Akira]

Dont mean to sound like a broken record but why dont we just wipe her clean and regroup?

I'm starting to think that might be best.

Not all messages are missing, there's alot of old ones that are still there. Almost like hacker half finished the job.

[Buzzed]

Dont mean to sound like a broken record but why dont we just wipe her clean and regroup?

Might be a good idea, but there is a lot of good links, set up info etc. We would have to re-do all that everytime a "newbie" comes in. (I'll probably get flak for that one).

Have a great day all... LONG WEEKEND ahead. Yeha.

[Serpent]

I wonder about what Buzzed said... what about all of the info posts for Ghosts in the GL area? ...etc..

[Akira]

Ok,
I could possibly repost these, as I have, in a raw file basically, the message content. I can copy/paste into new posts.

The cLAN thread though, is not really in a particular order, otherwise I'd just copy/paste it from the file into one post.

[Scion]

Don't worry about the GL postings. I can take care of all that. It's not too much to repost it all, anyways. I think this time I'll just wrap it all up into one big post instead of so many little ones. Got to be a bit much, the more stuff I thought of... I call Do Over!

[Serpent]

SIDENOTE: If it would help for the future, or if you all think it might be okay, I can setup a small shell script to a complete database dump of everything, and have it run daily ... and keep say, the past 5 days worth at once ... so if something happens one day and we don't even notice it, we can roll back the data to a couple days ago.

[Akira]

I can do backups, I was not really before, as I wasn't expecting this to happen.

phpBB is/has been so full of holes it seems. Heck, I have had older versions of other forums running, and never touched by a hacker.

I just figured that some sort of message recovery (due to current issue) would have been more straight forward. There's no help at phpbb.com forums on it.