So IPB4 deletes users accounts without warning?

[theblackelk]

I ended up finding the posts in the database with a user assigned but that user was deleted from the members table. I was able change the user name they created today to have the old ID. I also had a bunch that did not have that user name and user id that I was able to assign based on his IP. His posts no longer show Guest. Now how do I rebuild their post count?

[theblackelk]

Turns out it's impacting more than just the one and these guys are some of my most important posters. I have submitted a ticket and hope it gets worked on before Tuesday. They should not have to wait that long.

[Izaya Orihara]

Turns out it's impacting more than just the one and these guys are some of my most important posters. I have submitted a ticket and hope it gets worked on before Tuesday. They should not have to wait that long.

​Have you made a report so people know not to do this? I just did for my own community. Did your above fix help fix the issue?

[theblackelk]

I'm just waiting for IPB at this point. I found both of them in the database and without emails. I've added their emails and nothing. They can't log in and I can't find them outside of MySQL.

Annoying. Big time.

[theblackelk]

​Have you made a report so people know not to do this? I just did for my own community. Did your above fix help fix the issue?

​Okay, I figured out how to rebuild them. They live in one table, but not another. If they don't have email addresses, they do not get ported over. I'll put together a tutorial sometime soon. Expect it to be rough and quick since I am still putting out other fires.

[Izaya Orihara]

​Okay, I figured out how to rebuild them. They live in one table, but not another. If they don't have email addresses, they do not get ported over. I'll put together a tutorial sometime soon. Expect it to be rough and quick since I am still putting out other fires.

​Okay awesome. Looking forward to it.

[theblackelk]

Actually, here it is quickly:

• Go to phpMyAdmin  and select your forum database.
• Open another tab or window and do the same thing.
• In one of those, open the x_utf_ipb_core_members table and in the other one open the ipb_members table.
• You will see that this person exists in the ipb_members table, but not the other one. You need to get their information over to the other table. You can do this with an SQL query but I am just going to go with a more manual route for this since not all of the columns exist in both.
• Find the person in the ipb_members table. An easy way to do this is to click 'Search' and then enter their user name under name.
• Once you find them, click 'Edit' on the left side of the row.
• Go to the other window and click 'Copy' beside one of those rows.
• Now you just copy any data fields that exists in both tables from the fields in the ipb_members window to the corresponding fields in the x_utf_ipb_core_members window. These aren't always named the exact same thing.
• When you are done, click 'Go' in the x_utf_ipb_core_members window at the bottom.

 

That worked for me and worked well. Make sure you add their email.

 

​Okay awesome. Looking forward to it.

​

[Izaya Orihara]

Actually, here it is quickly:

• Go to phpMyAdmin  and select your forum database.
• Open another tab or window and do the same thing.
• In one of those, open the x_utf_ipb_core_members table and in the other one open the ipb_members table.
• You will see that this person exists in the ipb_members table, but not the other one. You need to get their information over to the other table. You can do this with an SQL query but I am just going to go with a more manual route for this since not all of the columns exist in both.
• Find the person in the ipb_members table. An easy way to do this is to click 'Search' and then enter their user name under name.
• Once you find them, click 'Edit' on the left side of the row.
• Go to the other window and click 'Copy' beside one of those rows.
• Now you just copy any data fields that exists in both tables from the fields in the ipb_members window to the corresponding fields in the x_utf_ipb_core_members window. These aren't always named the exact same thing.
• When you are done, click 'Go' in the x_utf_ipb_core_members window at the bottom.

 

That worked for me and worked well. Make sure you add their email.

 

​

​Okay I am so confused by this I am looking hard though.

Question: What if she remade her account with the same name she had beforehand? Like her name on the account that was deleted.

[Tripp★]

​Okay I am so confused by this I am looking hard though.

Question: What if she remade her account with the same name she had beforehand? Like her name on the account that was deleted.

I would imagine you are confused seeing as this missing email (I assume on Update) issue is something else completely, and has nothing to do with this topic =/ 

Although I fixed mine through PHPMyAdmin too.

The Red Arrow is pointing to the field that is causing the problems, this just needs a name in it. Nothing else needs to be done. You can search core_members for the members email address and set the username to her username and put "(OLD)" next to it. As I have already said you don't need to remake an account, just edit the one in the database that has no username anymore. If you don't know how to do it, I suggest opening a support ticket to IPS.

If she's already made a new account, you can simply name the account something else, for a temporary measure and "Merge" the two accounts together, in the ACP. This should merge the two accounts back into one. 

 

Be very careful here, make sure to read properly as if you do it wrong you will lose track of what you've done. Everything at the end of it should all be back on "A Username (OLD)" and the new "A Username" should be merged with the old one, then it'd just be a simple case of resetting "A Username (OLD)" back to "A Username".

This will require DB Access for the initial bit, so again, if you are going in there to mess around - Make a Backup of your Database First! If you have literally no idea what I'm talking about (Which I'm starting to suspect) then open a support ticket like many have requested you to do already. =/

Those of you encountering this on a live site, please submit a ticket. It is extremely likely they are simply hidden due to lack of a name and can be recovered so long as no drastic measures are taken based upon assumptions. Please let a support technician review your database.

​Done. Has anyone else got a ticket open about this specific issue? 

[Izaya Orihara]

I would imagine you are confused seeing as this missing email (I assume on Update) issue is something else completely, and has nothing to do with this topic =/ 

Although I fixed mine through PHPMyAdmin too.

The Red Arrow is pointing to the field that is causing the problems, this just needs a name in it. Nothing else needs to be done. You can search core_members for the members email address and set the username to her username and put "(OLD)" next to it. As I have already said you don't need to remake an account, just edit the one in the database that has no username anymore. If you don't know how to do it, I suggest opening a support ticket to IPS.

If she's already made a new account, you can simply name the account something else, for a temporary measure and "Merge" the two accounts together, in the ACP. This should merge the two accounts back into one.

 

Be very careful here, make sure to read properly as if you do it wrong you will lose track of what you've done. Everything at the end of it should all be back on "A Username (OLD)" and the new "A Username" should be merged with the old one, then it'd just be a simple case of resetting "A Username (OLD)" back to "A Username".

This will require DB Access for the initial bit, so again, if you are going in there to mess around - Make a Backup of your Database First! If you have literally no idea what I'm talking about (Which I'm starting to suspect) then open a support ticket like many have requested you to do already. =/

​Done. Has anyone else got a ticket open about this specific issue?

​I do.

Haven't received a reply yet. I'll look into trying to fix it myself if I can, I guess. Thanks.

[Tripp★]

Haven't received a reply yet. I'll look into trying to fix it myself if I can, I guess. Thanks.

​No, neither have I. IPS are generally good for it, but with a lot on their plates it might take them a little time. I wish you the best of luck. 

[Rhett]

Please keep in mind that our ticket response time is a little longer than normal, our SLA is 48 hours as well, due to the holiday weekend however, you may not get a reply until Tuesday. Myself nor Mark as stated in your bug report cannot re-produce this, we will look into your ticket though.

Thank you for your patience.

[Izaya Orihara]

​No, neither have I. IPS are generally good for it, but with a lot on their plates it might take them a little time. I wish you the best of luck.

​Okay this is where I am confused at. I can't find the other member account but I can find all her posts from her original account as you see in the screenshot below. I was able to edit that post to display whatever name I wanted it to say instead of guest. Of course that is not going to be a feasible option since that is over 500 posts and it's still not associated with an account.

So I guess my question is where I am going wrong. I feel like it is relatively simple but I am just not getting it

 

[Tripp★]

So I guess my question is where I am going wrong. I feel like it is relatively simple but I am just not getting it

​Then your best bet is waiting for IPS, I'm afraid. All the posts should be tied to a User ID not a Display Name. I've asked them in my ticket to give yours priority over mine (I have no idea if that was the plan) purely because your board is live at the moment, where as mine is private and a test.

The only other thing I can think of (And just tested) is going into the ACP and go to edit a user (doesn't matter which because you just need the URL). If you have the affected account's User ID you can edit the URL so where it says:

app=core&module=members&controller=members&do=edit&id=XXX

you change XXX to the user ID of the affected account. That way it's all done through the IPS software, like it was done to change it in the first place. You shouldn't need to do anything with the posts but then this bug could be affecting you in a different way. I'd happily look into it for you right now, but I think it's most certainly better to let IPS take a crack at it in all honesty.

[Izaya Orihara]

​Then your best bet is waiting for IPS, I'm afraid. All the posts should be tied to a User ID not a Display Name. I've asked them in my ticket to give yours priority over mine (I have no idea if that was the plan) purely because your board is live at the moment, where as mine is private and a test.

The only other thing I can think of (And just tested) is going into the ACP and go to edit a user (doesn't matter which because you just need the URL). If you have the affected account's User ID you can edit the URL so where it says:

app=core&module=members&controller=members&do=edit&id=XXX

you change XXX to the user ID of the affected account. That way it's all done through the IPS software, like it was done to change it in the first place. You shouldn't need to do anything with the posts but then this bug could be affecting you in a different way. I'd happily look into it for you right now, but I think it's most certainly better to let IPS take a crack at it in all honesty.

​Okay well I appreciate it nonetheless
I'll probably hear back from them by Tuesday.

[Kirill N]

It's not just members, one of the topics on my site is permanently gone after an upgrade to 4.0.6 because it had an emoji in the title. About to submit at ticket.

[NoGi]

Odd that no one picked it up during all the pre-releases or even here. lol

I think I might hold off upgrading for a little bit.

[Izaya Orihara]

Odd that no one picked it up during all the pre-releases or even here. lol

I think I might hold off upgrading for a little bit.

​Well it is rare really. Most people probably wouldn't have symbols in their username and/or topic titles. So it is not too odd.

[opentype]

By the way: i am pretty sure this is not related to symbols or Emoji per se, but simply to characters outside Unicode’s so-called Basic Multilingual Plane. 

[Tripp★]

I find it very curious that IPS couldn't reproduce it yet we could. I'm actually quite interested in testing this out on a fresh installation. =/ I think I will use their downtime over the weekend to do some more tests with it, but I suspect @Ralf H. is absolutely spot on with his assessment. 

[media]

​Well it is rare really. Most people probably wouldn't have symbols in their username and/or topic titles. So it is not too odd.

​On your board maybe, some other boards it might be common practice... for example mine, I see my members doing all the time...

[opentype]

I find it very curious that IPS couldn't reproduce it yet we could.

​It probably only happens for certain database configurations, where the four-byte characters somehow cause problems. 

[theblackelk]

The guys on my board did not have symbols in their names. The common thread with them was a lack of email address. I'm not sure if the bug caused that or if that is what caused the bug, though.

 

either way, the fix is not too difficult. Just was scary when I first noticed. 

[Tripp★]

The guys on my board did not have symbols in their names. The common thread with them was a lack of email address. I'm not sure if the bug caused that or if that is what caused the bug, though.

 

either way, the fix is not too difficult. Just was scary when I first noticed. 

​Do they have anything in common like did they all use Facebook/Twitter/Google/Steam or something to sign in? I had a problem like this in the past; it turned out it was a malformed Facebook Connect request or something. I'm just guessing here; but I try to look for something they all have in common between the accounts.

---

Okay, so I just installed a fresh copy of IPS4 as a Dev (Not upgraded 3.4.7) and I can no longer reproduce this:

Next I will be trying upgrading from 3.4.8 to 4.0.6.1 directly and seeing if I can reproduce it.

[Tripp★]

Okay; yep. It seems to be upgraded installations that it's reproducible on. I wonder if this is why it couldn't be reproduced by staff...

This happened after setting username to: ?A Username

It still didn't "Delete" the account though, so I suspect (and hope) the account is still there, somewhere, Dorian. I have my fingers crossed for you.

BUT... I had a look at my database; more specifically Collation's. Take a peak at this noise:

Now I would like to say Collation doesn't imply causation... xP

But then I remembered what @Ralf H. said earlier:

​It probably only happens for certain database configurations, where the four-byte characters somehow cause problems. 

​An emoji is a 4byte character, right? So I looked into it and found that it was utf8_unicode_ci which I changed to utf8mb4_unicoode_ci. This didn't fix it, and I found that the actual name was also stuck on this collation, so I changed that to utf8mb4_unicoode_ci and all. This didn't work either. But silly me, it's also varchar(255) -> Which I changed to BLOB, (As a type)... Low and behold:

Fixed it.