I will try to explain this as best I can as it's a really weird one.

Have had a forum since about 2004 I think, and over that time have made many mistakes with the database and categories but I've found that I have many topics and threads on the site that don't appear, and I think it's because they don't have any parent category attached for them to appear in. (this is a guess at this stage)

This could have come about when archiving and unarchiving, whilst at the same time deleting parent categories and leaving the topics/posts homeless (yes I know - I messed up)

So I know the stuff is there, it's in the database somewhere but the topics just aren't showing on the forums at all.

I'd really like to resurface them (maybe in a new parent category set to private so I can moderate them if needed)

Does this make any sense at all?

If you made a new forum (not category) to place them in, you could run the following database query to move your existing orphaned topics to the new forum (make sure you take a full database backup first in case anything goes wrong).

update forums_topics set forum_id=X where forum_id not in(select id from forums_forums);

Replace 'X' with the new forum id you just created, and add any database table prefix you may have to the two table names.

 

If you made a new forum (not category) to place them in, you could run the following database query to move your existing orphaned topics to the new forum (make sure you take a full database backup first in case anything goes wrong).

update forums_topics set forum_id=X where forum_id not in(select id from forums_forums);

Replace 'X' with the new forum id you just created, and add any database table prefix you may have to the two table names.

 

Thank you

I"m a newbie when it comes to touching databases (hence the mess i got myself in ha ha)

Could you give me a dummy example idea of the table prefix bit?

When you install the software you can specify a prefix, though none is specified by default in recent versions. You would have to open your conf_global.php file and look for the sql_prefix option to see if one is specified. If there is (let's say "ibf_" as we used to default to in the olden days), then the query would need to use "ibf_forums_topics" and "ibf_forums_forums" instead.

Brilliant thank you!

Will give this a go..

I would also suggest to rebuild your search index once the query was run successful 

Thank you

Can I do that in ACP or do I need to go into the PHPmyAdmin?

 

Thank you

Can I do that in ACP or do I need to go into the PHPmyAdmin?

Yea, you can rebuild it via the ACP => System => search page 

 

Thank you Daniel

I just ran the query and it came up with Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 Warnings: 0

I'm guessing that means it didn't' really do much?

 

 

Just went to system and click the search button and got this..

 

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access this resource.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

 

I'm not having much luck today ha ha

Please submit a ticket, I’ll be more than happy to take a look at this.

 

Please submit a ticket, I’ll be more than happy to take a look at this.

 

 

Thanks @Daniel F- will do it now

I've done a screenshot of the archive settings which also don't make any sense to me either - have I lost topics somewhere that affects the archive system?