Was my account deleted somehow?

[LisaNeverSayDie]

I've had an account as LisaInOregon for 5 years but it sure looks like it's been deleted! Is there a way to get it back? I *really* hate to lose my language log. I'd downloaded it as of 2/28/2022, but that's a couple of years gone.
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=10854

I've had to create a new account under a different email just to try to figure out what's going on.

[themethod]

Unfortunately, a bunch of people's accounts and posts were deleted because of some kind of script the admins ran.

As far as I know, there's no way to recover the previous posts, but that's just what I've heard "through the grapevine" by reading other posts scattered around the forum, since the mods don't seem keen on making any sort of formal announcement or answering emails regarding the subject.

[Iversen]

The mods don't know either precisely what happened, so that's why we can't answer. But the scant information that transpired through the grapewine seems to be true.. something went wrong, and the lost things are irreparably lost.

Btw I have all my own messages (and some direct answers to them) stored in a set of MsWord files, but it isn't updated daily so if the entire forum or just my own account suddenly disappeared some items would be lost for good. But even having such a personal backup could only be a partial consolation.

[LisaNeverSayDie]

Well. I can probably recreate when I started and stopped languages but there's other data I'm really going to miss.

I was looking for but failing to find a way to have my posts emailed to me? That's how forums used to work in olden times, and it's been nice to just read online, but that was when I thought online was a safer place for my log than just email or some file on a disk... Anyway, is there any such feature to send email or make it easier to save posts?

[Purangutan]

I've had an account as LisaInOregon for 5 years but it sure looks like it's been deleted! Is there a way to get it back? I *really* hate to lose my language log. I'd downloaded it as of 2/28/2022, but that's a couple of years gone.
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=10854

I've had to create a new account under a different email just to try to figure out what's going on.

Like you, I also lost my log... but fortunately, I found a way to recover it! Not all of it, but almost everything.

Here’s what you can try: search for each page of your log on Bing's cache. Go to Bing.com and search for "Lisa's Language Log" "page X" (in quotes). Click on the small arrow next to the URL, then select "Cached page" to view the content. Repeat this for every page. I was able to find entries up to May 7, 2024.

Hope this helps!

[daegga]

The forum exposes an RSS feed for new posts. With the right software you can use this to create a local copy.
E.g. via a local tinyRSS server

[LisaNeverSayDie]

I've had an account as LisaInOregon for 5 years but it sure looks like it's been deleted! Is there a way to get it back? I *really* hate to lose my language log. I'd downloaded it as of 2/28/2022, but that's a couple of years gone.
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=10854

I've had to create a new account under a different email just to try to figure out what's going on.

Like you, I also lost my log... but fortunately, I found a way to recover it! Not all of it, but almost everything.

Here’s what you can try: search for each page of your log on Bing's cache. Go to Bing.com and search for "Lisa's Language Log" "page X" (in quotes). Click on the small arrow next to the URL, then select "Cached page" to view the content. Repeat this for every page. I was able to find entries up to May 7, 2024.

Hope this helps!

thank you, thank you, thank you ! I was able to find the cached pages and now it's recovered to May 7 of 2024. I appreciate this tip very much! I've been kind of down about it. I should know better about regular backups.

There is now only a few months missing, and the May 7 post was my starting back on French. All I have to do is remember the french wind-down in August; I can get my word counts from the anki deck... I can live without my musings on anki cards...

[emk]

Good morning.

This is the first I've heard of any of this, unfortunately. Absolutely nothing has happened on my end that should change anything, and I haven't run any scripts at all.

If the data loss is recent enough, I might be able to recover database backups. But we don't keep them forever, so I rely on people letting me know what's going on.

Could someone please confirm (1) when this happened, and (2) roughly what data disappeared? It may be too late to do anything, but it doesn't hurt for me to look.

EDIT: My oldest backup is from October 30th, and I should have daily backups between then and now. I've made copies of the oldest backups so they don't get overwritten when new backups are created. I also have a complete backup from 2024-05-01 if we're missing older data.

I can work on this, but I will need someone to help isolate the scale of any data loss. Does anyone want to try to figure out what happened and what we're missing?

[Iversen]

I have sent a PM to emk, but it's correct that at least four or five trusty old members have lost their accounts, and that the threads from them have disappeared too - but hopefully leaving their new replacement accounts active. And apparently you can retrieve some data from the archives of browsers and similar places, but that will take time and not necessarily return all the data lost.

As for the exact time - well, I just know that something must have happened since May, because the page numbers in my rather large log thread have changed since I last updated my lists over used languages and images in May (phew! I could have been gone too!). It's definitely not the same cause, but maybe another element in some kind of general cleaning up action that just went wrong for those members that lost their accounts completely. A backup from October 30 iwill probably not be of much help in the current situation since the first reports from members with new replacement accounts popped up several weeks ago. And we cannot know the extent of the problem, since other old lost members could just have given up - we only hear from those that chose to make new accounts. A copy from January might be useful, but the question is whether it can return some accounts without overwriting others that weren't hit in the first place.

[emk]

I have backups from May 1st (made manually) and Oct 30th (made automatically, but I made a manual duplicate this morning so it doesn't get overwritten).

I could possibly restore one of or more deleted accounts through May 1st, but that might involve a couple of days of SQL work on my end.

I was really hoping that this was something like "We suffered global data loss to everything in the last few days, so we can just roll back to an appropriate backup and lose a few days of recent posts (in a worst case scenario).

But this sounds like an older problem affecting only a subset of users, which means any restoration would need to use the May backup, and would need to be a manual copying of lots of low level data between two different databases.

Probably recovering raw post text through May for specific accounts is less work.