There seems to have some hickup with my server, and as a result a user (or more) seems to have been deleted.
Although the username still shows up in the 'view active topics' list, when I click on the username, it tell me the user does not exist (although this does give me the userID number). His posts (old & new) seem to have disappeared as well. When I search for username ACP, it does not find the member.
I've checked the admin & moderator logs, and the user was NOT deleted.
I ran the database repair, but nothing was recovered.
I assume the information is still in there somewhere, so I'm hoping there's just something in the database that got corrupted that can be fixed.
How can I find the details of this persons in the database, to check if he's still there, and fix any incorrect settings?
Hope someone can help, as I've not done anything like this before.
Everything is stored within the database. Only way to retrieve something from the database is to have a backup of that database. Seems as though, maybe, your host restored a database from a backup when the user didn't exist?
There is no way to retrieve information from a database unless you have a backup that had the information within it.
Yes I do have backups of the database, which gets older by the days of course.
My host did not restore a database from a backup, they simply repaired the database. I can't see how a server glitch could delete the account of a user plus all their posts as well (they had thousands of posts starting several years ago), so I expect the information is still in there somewhere.
How do I check if the user is still in the database? I've never messed around with the database before. The user number that's missing is 14116
I can go into phphmyadmin and select the database, but which table do I search in?
Is it in acl_users?
I've searched for the user ID and username in the user table, it does not find anything.
The member has been posting for several years, with thousands of posts.
Surely it's not likely all his posts are suddenly ALL deleted? Is it not more likely they're still in the database somewhere, but it's not showing since some setting in the database is not right?
I've tried that, and found that all the posts are still there, which is good news!
So it seems only the user profiles were deleted.
I've asked the users (who had their profiles deleted), to create new accounts.
Once this is done, can I simple change their userID to the userID they had before (via PHPmyAdmin), to link their new profile to all their old posts & PMs? Or is more required to assign their old posts to their new profile?
Once this is done, can I simple change their userID to the userID they had before (via PHPmyAdmin), to link their new profile to all their old posts & PMs?
That is the easiest way I think
Just try it, you can always reverse it