XF 2.2 deleting a member causes thread instability when it is first post

[briansol]

Deleting the first post of a thread deletes the thread by design.

But, i have a thread where the first post has been deleted through a bulk option (i deleted the user i think - it was years ago) and the thread still renders, yet comes up with no content. (empty grey background - no errors, nothing in source code)

Using the amp view (via 3rd party plugin) page, it all renders showing the issue is that the first post user was deleted but i do get an error for the getcoverimage() routine in the admin logs because again, the first post is missing.

The thread owner is wrong, as it now points to post #2 for all that information.

I can share a link if desired with staff.

 

[Chris D]

This may be more of a support issue than a bug.

We don’t actually provide any tools to delete a user’s content when a user is deleted. So if you had something like this it was either an add-on or some sort of manual process.

If we did have such a thing we would do it in such a way that the entire thread would be deleted too.

There may be a workaround which is to run the thread rebuild and rebuild post position counters. That would change post #2 to post #1 and most likely reattribute the thread to that new first post user. Which may not be what you want but I think that may be the only solution.

 

[briansol]

Yeah, i'm not exactly sure what transpired... i banned that first poster in like 2007 so it was years ago.
admin action- ban account

Later, he threatened a lawsuit and demanded all his content removed.
admin action - soft-delete all poster's content via some manual action (probably raw query to set visibility to hidden)

that's the likely flow. Perhaps there's an additional step i should take.

 

[PaulB]

This was definitely an issue in the days of XF 1.x after importing from vBulletin 3.x. Due to some quirk—presumably in vBulletin—you could end up with dangling threads and posts. I assume migrating such a forum from 1.x to 2.x would preserve the dangling content. It’s been a long time since I checked, but, if I recall correctly, such content was treated as nonexistent by vBulletin, so the thread would be inaccessible until imported into XF.