I just lost a category full of threads when making a new category

yariplus

Have you done a database backup? It sounds like the category may still be there, I would do a backup asap in case things get worse.

No idea how it happened. Sounds to me like some kind of error in the acp when changing the parentCid or children properties of the category. Don't think it has anything to do with the name.

Pilvinen

Yes I did backup as soon as this happened. The messages are still there but if I enable the category the forum stops working ... I tried checking out all the tables from Redis that show up with KEYS category but I can't see anything out of place except that the malfunctioning category had itself set as it's parent - which I fixed and it showed up in the Admin Control Panel after that.

But all the subcategories are somehow messed up - I'm getting categories showing up in several places at once - which I fixed by deleting all subcategories ... but the remaining issue is that I can't access the malfunctioning category at all.

I don't know what to do about it.

<baris>

If a category has itself as the parent that would cause an infinite loop in the category retrieval. We should disallow that. Can you post a link to your forum?

<baris>

If you are on latest update to https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/commit/5b08538264846717b350df8c5ce1d44a0cd56c50

Pilvinen

Confirmed the problem is fixed by this in latest master. I can now access the category which previously caused infinite loop. By the way, in the Redis database the broken category didn't have itself as parent so I don't know why this would happen ... but it works now so I'm happy. Thanks.

<baris>

@Pilvinen there is another sorted set that has the categories children. Check that as well.

zrange cid:<parent_cid>:children 0 -1

replace <parent_cid> with the category id of the parent.

Pilvinen

@baris
You were right. The zrange of that category still has itself set as the parant. I'm a bit hazy on the details how the zranges work ... how do I change that value?

<baris>

Post the output of the zrange that you run.

Pilvinen

@baris

zrange cid:7:children 0 -1
1 ) "7"

<baris>

You can remove it by zrem cid:7:children 7

Pilvinen

@baris
Thanks. It's now been removed - though the forums already worked fine even without this after the infinite loop was prevented. But better safe than sorry.

<baris>

Yeah it does work because of the check I added in core. I also added a check so you can't set the parent to itself to prevent it happening again.