[wp-hackers] Data recovery (post_status?)

[Matt Mullenweg]

Michael E. Hancock wrote:
> There's some irony here because it was an accidental deletion of a post in
> the Forums by one of the ops that seemed to get this whole thread started.

More irony!

When I wrote bbPress it was from scratch so it never actually deleted 
anything. I'm not sure if it's exposed in the UI properly, but if you 
ping me with the thread ID I can bring it back. Someone like Podz should 
also be able to do it in the bbPress admin interface.

That said, I think the usage patterns of forums with lots of (possibly) 
untrusted moderators is very different from that of blogs.

In WP most "delete" buttons turn red (first flag) and have a popup 
warning that isn't used anywhere else in the program (flag two). I think 
this is sufficient. Sometimes users really want delete. (Remember all 
the complaints about Gmail when it came out without a delete button?)

For truly catastrophic failures we've always had backups.

Short of versioning every field in WP, including categories, meta 
fields, user info, passwords, etc, I think implementing a half-assed 
"universal undo" is worse than none at all. Furthermore, this is more 
the realm of a plugin for the ultra-paranoid rather than adding enormous 
complexity to WP for a single unlikely edge case.

That said, in a plugin maybe someone could do a DB dump after every 
write or update operation and then SVN commit the file, so a true 
rollback of WP would be possible. Since only diffs would be stored it 
wouldn't take up much space, and you'd have the robustness of SVN to 
tag/branch/revert the entire DB. (And possibly WP itself?)

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
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