Got a couple ghost categories

luke

Purged some categories today and now I've got these ghost categories I can't get rid of:

No idea what's going on here and I doubt I could reproduce it, but is there a way to fix it?

I've tried restarting NodeBB.

a_5mith

@luke Nice edit at the end there.

Have you tried creating the categories again, saving, then deleting again?

luke

@a_5mith Haha.

Just tried creating the most recent deletions again and deleting them. No luck.

<baris>

Are you using mongo or redis?

luke

@baris Redis.

luke

When I disable one of them (which does nothing, it's still there when I refresh) I get this notification:

<baris>

I think your forum is imported right? That might be the cause. Can you run the following in redis-cli.

zrange categories:cid 0 -1
hget global nextCid

luke

@baris Here you go:

<baris>

Ok now you can get a list of category ids(cids) from your forum that are valid. Just look at the slugs for each category and note the id down.

luke

@baris 13, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 26, 31.

<baris>

So category id 14 and 20 are invalid. To check their data

hgetall category:14
hgetall category:20

And to remove them permenantly.

del category:14
zrem categories:cid 14

del category:20
zrem categories:cid 20

Does this issue still happen if you create a new category and purge it?

luke

@baris That fixed it! Made a new category and deleted it, and no ghosts this time. Weird.

<baris>

The issue doesn't happen on a new install so I'm guessing it has something to do with the import process. NodeBB creates 12 categories during setup process so any category created after that will start from cid 13. Looking at the ids you posted seems like the impoter lets nodebb create the default categories and then imports the new categories after 13 so thats why your nextCid value is high.

I skimmed over the impoter code but didn't see anything wrong yet. Maybe @bentael might have a better idea.

luke

Might have been because I didn't use the --flush flag when I ran the importer command for this instance.

a_5mith

I ran into the same thing, so my categories also start from 13. Never really bothered me, but you're not along @luke,

luke

@a_5mith Yeah doesn't really bother me either, because I've also deleted a lot of the categories I've imported. It would be cool if I could change the IDs for the existing ones, but I've already started linking to them, so probably not a good idea.

<baris>

@luke said:

Might have been because I didn't use the --flush flag when I ran the importer command for this instance.

Yeah I'm not sure how runFlush effects things, looks like if you specify runFlush it runs nodebb's setup before importing.

luke

@baris Seems to delete all content and then sets up an admin account with the username "admin" and the password "password", before it imports the data.

<baris>

Oh so if you don't specify flush it won't touch the data in the redis instance, that might explain why some data was invalid.

bentael

always use --flush, unless for some reason, the import process got interrupted (crashed and you do not want to restart it) (i am going to get rid of this feature soon, it's too confusing, probably useless, and very error prone)
also, yes, the importer lets NodeBB create the first 12 categories, then attempts to delete them, before it starts importing source categories, hence the id 13 as the first one.

I do not know why the data looked weird, but it's most likely because you haven't flushed before importing.