Missing Forum

[ops@geocaching.com]

Earlier this afternoon, one of our Admins was attempting to reorganize and create a new category to move a couple long-running discussion forums. After moving the second discussion forum under the newly created parent forum category, he checked the "user view" to make sure they appeared as desired.

Once the home page loaded, the new category was no longer present and one of the discussion forums was missing. The second relocated discussion forum was visible and showed 17815 posts, but now with no parent assigned and when clicking into the forum none of those 17815 posts appear.

Accessing the MySQL database directly, the forums_forums table still shows the entries for both forums. The forum that is completely missing in the UI is assigned id=2 and the one visible with 17815 posts is id=17. Is there a way to get these forums back online again without requiring a restore from backup? It appears that the forum and post data is intact, but some sort of change is required for permissions or visibility.

What is the appropriate method to restore access and visibility to these forums?

[bfarber]

My hunch is that the parent_id did not get set properly somehow. If the data is still in the database then it should be possible to restore it without requiring a database backup to be restored, however I would encourage you to submit a ticket so we can try to investigate how they went missing in the first place (obviously that doesn't sound like expected or intended behavior).

[ops@geocaching.com]

bfarber was on the right track. Somehow the "Bug reports & feature requests" forum was changed from Discussions to a Category type, and the other forum was left orphaned with no parent. We were able to locate that "missing" forum in the UI by using the global search field and then edit the forum settings back to it having a proper parent. It was very strange that both of these things occurred in the first place and it was certainly not expected or intended. Thanks again for pointing us in the right direction for a resolution!