Oops...batch edit mistake. D'oh!!!

Ok I wanted to clear out like 147 Comments of the Comment Wall of a particular Group. I went into Batch Edit, under group comment count, and I changed the number from 147 to 0 for that group only, and hit 'update'.
The result was that the entire Group --and all its 6 years of discussions, comments, the group name and url, all its members, group image....EVERYTHING, was gone.

See screenshot for where i did this. The group was called Baritone dulcimer Players and it's now at top since I recreated it.

What the heck did I do wrong?? Was I in the wrong place?? The wall comment count for that group was correct in the left side data box.


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015
updated by @strumelia: 09/05/15 03:44:41AM

I would like to know what I did wrong- was I even in the right place for deleting multiple comments off of a group's Comment Wall? I thought I was, but then I vaporized the whole group into thin air!


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

Let me check this out, I think I still have your logins.
The chances are the comments are still there. Let me work out what you did then I've get back here with what was wrong.
Thanks


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

No quite sure what has gone on here but I can say that you were in the wrong place to delete comments. The Batch Edit is an 'advanced' tool that works directly on the datastores and it is possible to break thinks if used incorrectly. You cannot 'mass delete' comments with this tool.

What were you wanting to do? Just delete the comments on the group itself but keep its discussions?


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

Yes Paul, I have groups that have comment walls that accumulate hundreds of Comments- the comment walls become too massive to navigate at that point, useless old comments and chitchat...
I want to be able to clear out all comments in a group's comment wall without effecting or deleting anything else in that group. Instead, I managed to delete the entire Baritone group and everything in it. I created a 'new' baritone group from scratch..nothing was left of the old one.

At first I tried deleting one comment at a time from a group's comment wall, but it was impossibly clumsy and un-navigable to do that...would take me back to the first page of comments every time I deleted ONE comment. Would have taken me two hours to clear one wall. Gotta be an easier way.
Thanks....


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

That might need something custom or a mod to the comment module to add in a tool to do something like that. Let me think about the best way to approach this.
Thanks


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

That would be great!

So easy to delete forum discussions along with all their replies, in one click of the trash can.
But Comment Walls can become EPIC over the years with hundreds of comments in each group...and all the old comments become irrelevant, unwieldy junk. Most of my Groups are 6 years old now, and are favorites with my members. Need to save everything else, but Comments are good to just clear out once every couple years.


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

On my Ning site, which is still operating, I have deleted comment walls for most groups because people tend to use comments to attempt communicating with members of the group, not realising that there is no notification of comments to group members through email.

In a Ning group, when anyone posts a message in the group forum, all members of the group are notified about the new message, through email. They don't have to actively log in to monitor the group activity. Unless they turn off that particular messaging option in their privacy settings.


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PJ Matthews, Kyoto
Migrated from Ning 2.0. Now at Jamroom 6 beta and using Jamroom Hosting for The Research Cooperative (researchcooperative.org)

Yes, I'm having various complaints about how Groups are functioning, and i realize that not all things can or should be made to work just like they did on Ning. but many things were more logical in Groups on ning, and I know you JR Team created a 'groups' function just for us...for which I am grateful.

"In a Ning group, when anyone posts a message in the group forum, all members of the group are notified about the new message, through email. They don't have to actively log in to monitor the group activity. Unless they turn off that particular messaging option in their privacy settings."
-This is something my members are vocal about missing. They liked being able to 'follow' a whole group to receive notification whenever someone posted a new post in the entire group forum, or when someone created a new group forum discussion. Now they have to specifically 'follow' individual group discussions, and they can totally miss the fact that there are new discussions going on in the group.

As opposed to PJ, I really do need to keep my groups having Comment Walls- otherwise members create superficial 'discussions' for every little silly comment they might have. These comment walls are often used for Group 'idle chitchat', so they get hugely long and i really need to be able to 'clear' them once in a while.

I have another support thread open here right now to try and re-order my Groups' 'forum discussions' so that recent comments will bring a group discussion up to top again...this has been another related problem in groups, and I'm tryng to get a fix for that right now.

Another issue is that because the discussions in Groups are not 'really' discussions, as Gary pointed out...but are rather a post with subsequent 'comments'... this means nobody has the ability to QUOTE from a previous response in order to respond appropriately to some particular point without having to 'explain' what point they are responding to. This is also something members are complaining about every week.

I have no tnymce text editor Quote --or-- COPY/PASTE right-click function, and the 'discussion' replies are really comments so they do not have a 'quote' button either. People are raging that we see copy/past options in the tnymce right clicks, but then get told over and over that we cannot USE the options and must instead use keyboard copy/paste if we want to 'quote' anything. Plus even after we've keyboard copy/pasted a passage from the previous comment... then we can only indent, not really create quotes saying who wrote it.
I do keep explaining over and over to members WHY we can't do these various things, but they really are understandably annoyed and frustrated. Thus, I'm trying to tackle one of these little Group problems at a time here in the JR support forums. THIS thread is about my being able to CLEAR the comment walls occasionally. My other current thread is about ordering the groups' discussions to reflect most recent activity...because members cannot 'follow' a whole Group and are thus missing out on new discussions entirely and are no longer notified on older discussions from ning that they 'used to' get notified about. I will be opening new threads later about the Quote and Copy/Paste issues in Group discussions and comments.

Ok, hope that makes a few things more clear as to where I'm going with all this.

Paul, will wait to see if you are able to somehow get us the ability to more efficiently clear out a group's comment wall without altering anything else in the group... thanks for looking into it!

P.S. still trying to figure out the actual PURPOSE of the Batch Edit page I was in when I accidentally deleted that entire 6 year old group...in my my screenshot. What would one do in that "group comment count" batch edit page ...if not delete group comments?? Easy enough to just delete a whole group from the Group page itself...I figured the 'delete' checkboxes in the page i was on was SURELY for deleting the comments listed to the left of each of the delete boxes...like, HUH??


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

This does not clear comments - this simply changed the "comment count" field to 0. Comments are stored on the User Comments module datastore.

I have no idea however WHY it appears to have deleted anything, since that batch edit is just going to do an UPDATE. My suspicion is that nothing was actually deleted, but somehow became "unlinked" in the DB. This is the first we've seen something like this, so hopefully we can replicate it here and get it fixed up.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

And just to add - it is almost NEVER a good idea to use the batch editor. You run the risk of changing values that should not be changed, but of course we leave that up to you to decide if the risk is worth it.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Well, to see if you can replicate- like i said in my screenshot above- I had the Baritone Dulcimer Group there showing on the left column of Group avatars, it had its comment count in it's comment count box there. I changed that number to ZERO, then I 'checkmarked' the Delete box in the right column. Then I clicked the page bottom's save/update button. There was a nag screen asking if I was 'sure' i wanted to delete, but I assumed it meant the comments. Looking back, I suspect the delete boxes on right are actually for deleting the entire Group?- which is what happened.
I should not have assumed, and yes I now realize the Batch Edit is probably not a great module for me to mess with until much later on- I thought it was more harmless and I was sooo sure that the page i was at was the right place to delete the comments off a comment wall. Group comment wall count?...delete/change numbers?..
It's clearly something I should NOT have done on a real live group first. Obviously i'd like to get that Baritone group back again, since it was 6 years old and had 178 members or so with lots of good info...but hey I'm thinking it's gone, it's beyond my reach anyway, and my members will just have to suffer my mistake.
I learned my lesson for sure. Just glad it was not one of my top ten groups! I started a brand new Baritone Group and they'll just have to start over. They haven't noticed just yet... d'OH! My moderators know, and I think they just silently raised their eyebrows at my dumb move. Or more likely they are discussing my 'brilliant' move behind my back.... lol

So... at the risk of getting you fed up...I'm curious...
when you say "This does not clear comments - this simply changed the "comment count" field to 0. Comments are stored on the User Comments module datastore."
....well so what actually HAPPENS when the comment count for that group gets changed to zero (or another number) and 'updated'?- and why would one want to do that in the first place? Sorry to pester you but I'd like to understand.
When Batch Edit module was introduced, it sounded like something real handy for me to use: https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/forum/new_posts/25629/is-there-a-way-to-empty-the-activity-feed-cache/search_string=batch+edit


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

When you change the field it just changes the field - but there's always more to it than that ... a lot of times items are "ordered by" these fields, and if you empty it then it no longer is "seen" in the list (since there is not a valid value to order by).

Instead of REMOVING the value, you need to change it to "0". I've just done that for you in your DB - reset caches and see if your group is back.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Thanks Brian for trying.
I'm afraid the Baritone Dulcimer Players Group you see there is the NEW empty one i created, with the same name. So it's not back.
When i checked the 'delete' box and hit Update, it completely removed the group from that Batch Edit page list altogether, so I could not have set it to 0 anyway. Here's the the thing- I'm pretty sure I remember setting the original group's comment number in the box to the number 0 (rather than having a blank box) before I did the delete+Update thing.
In any case, you set the NEW replacement group's comments to 0, which didn't effect the 'deleted' old group of course, and the new group doesn't have any comments yet anyway.
I did give the NEW group the exact same name as the old group. But you can see the 'new'Baritone group is item/group number 62...the most recent group created.


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015