Why I will not be using the Archiving system again

[Makoto]

To put it simply, the Archiving system makes me afraid my forum is going to spontaneously combust into flames. It's caused issues the one time I used it before, when the system was first introduced. Somewhat similar problems to a recently posted bug report which I'm hoping I won't run into again during the unarchiving process.

On to my current obvious problem. I set up archiving rules to archive just around ~6% of my forums topics. It was only to archive threads in my anime forums Roleplaying category. Nowhere else. Everything seemed well. You can see the settings show no issues here,

Only archive threads in the two Roleplaying forums that have not seen activity in over a month. Simple enough. Shouldn't be any problems.

But I come back later tomorrow morning to see this,

WHAT?!

Confused, I go back to recheck my settings. This is what I see.

It's archiving every single thread on my forum that's over a month old. The archiving system decided, on its own, out of nowhere, to ignore my forum filters and just start archiving everything everywhere, only respecting the topic last post filter. Editing the settings again causes it to go back to displaying that it will only archive ~6% of the forum topics, but simply reloading the page will cause it to display the bugged value once again.

The last time I used the archiving system, posts from old popular threads on my forum disappeared out of nowhere. Very valuable threads containing very lengthy posts from Fiction/Fanfiction entries that members had spent months working on. I was barely able to recover these from old backups when I noticed the issue later. Ever since then, I developed a complete distrust for the archiving system.

Now, I decide to give it another chance to help cut down on the forums database size by only archiving topics that don't need to be searched for and that won't really be missed if anything catastrophic happened with the archiving process. This is what I apparently get.

At least I made backups this time, if it comes to the worst.

[Dmacleo]

I have not had much luck making it archive specific forums only either.

[Makoto]

I have not had much luck making it archive specific forums only either.

Yep, I see you also made a bug report on this months ago.

http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/bugs.html/_/ip-board/archiver-not-following-rules-r41016

Edit: Thankfully, I don't seem to have lost any posts after unarchiving everything. This kind of stuff is still enough to make me paranoid though.

I had a frustrating experience with losing posts once a long time ago, hence I only intended to archive posts/topics I didn't really care about this time just to be safe. Then I find out it's decided to ignore my filters and archive over half my forums topics. Eyah.

[Ichirō]

I also had a similar problem with archiving and i didnt realise it had happened until i had angry messages asking where members threads had dissapeared too.

[Dmacleo]

I forgot to follow up on that ticket :(

but not using it fixed it for me..

[Michael]

Why are you posting this here instead of submitting a ticket about this? This is not feedback, it is a support issue.

[Midnight Modding]

It's feedback in the sense that apparently it's been buggy for a long time with no sign of being fixed.

edit: apparently the only bug report linked to did not have an update is why it may not be fixed. Either way, this is more appropriate for this forum than certain other things in other forums, let's just say. ;)

[Makoto]

I did also post a bug report here,

http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/bugs.html/_/ip-board/archiving-system-ignores-forum-filters-r42602

[bfarber]

This is not really feedback. You (potentially) found a bug in the software. That is what the tracker is for. :)

When this was previously reported we asked for a ticket to be submitted and apparently nothing came of that so we did not have an opportunity to investigate the issue. Looks like there may be a ticket now so we will look into the problem and work on a resolution.