Forum Discussion
@WiderMouthOpen, it should still be possible to restore all your posts. The functionality built into this website probably wouldn't delete them. It most likely just marks them as "deleted" and they're retained. If that's the case, permanently deleting your posts would have required someone with permission to add, change,or delete data in tables to access the database directly.
I agree about the red flags. Deleting all of a user's posts is an activity that should have been logged for review. But, this non-monetary application might not include that level of control. Apparently, deleting all of a user's posts, without removing the forum user's ID, isn't something that's normally done.
Admins able to mark posts as "deleted" would probably be able to "undelete" them too. Hopefully, Becky or TiffanyR will discover how to do that for all of your removed posts soon.
@Becky, if there's no forums admin function to restore selected user posts that were removed, it might be possible to do it on the backend. Do you have contact with a forums DBA for whom you could ask to verify if deleted posts are actually deleted or just marked as deleted and retained in the table? If the latter is true, Cox should consider having the DBA run an update query to reset the "deleted" settings on his posts back to active. I realize that's not a generally accepted practice and could undelete posts WiderMouthOpen deleted, too. But deleting all of a user's posts without cause is not a generally accepted practice either. If the table contains a "Deleted_Date" field, the update query could be limited to just his posts deleted the day they were all removed. It it's not available, the restore would be more complicated. If a "Deleted_By" field is available, it would be useful in your investigation to determine what happened.
Thank you for your detailed input. What worries me is even if it is technically possible to retrieve posts marked for deletion, the work required on the backend to do so will be avoided. Also, even if the posts get retrieved, I don't think we will get a honest answer of what happened. Too much inside policy.
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