Stupidly deleted a long thread - can I redirect/point to the restored one?

[ozstamps]

Apologies for the dumbo query - own a largish free board, but sadly I am not tech minded at all - a PhpBB whizz in the USA generally was able to quickly sort things for us over many years, but he has gone totally AWOL right now, and is not answering emails. Maybe he is ill .... not sure?

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. A heavily viewed and visited thread, and needs to be sorted ASAP. I have zero knowledge of the board back end, or how anything works sadly.

Very stupidly, I deleted a long thread with 100,000s of views when very tired at 3am, that has many links pointing to it from all over the world, many of which are external, and those I cannot access or alter, so need to create a fast workaround of some kind.

This is the deleted thread - anyone clicking on the many direct links to it now gets a 'PAGE NOT FOUND - TOPIC DOES NOT EXIST' message, as can be seen -

(Link removed by OP as the re-direction issue now resolved - many thanks!)

I have re-created that thread laboriously, as another totally different URL, as it appears back-ups were not being done, or were not accessible to re-create the original - is it possible to somehow redirect anyone clicking on that original thread, so they land on the new URL?

With my normal websites that is possible, but sadly have absolutely no idea how phpBB works for things like that.

Or better still, can the original php?t=97479 be re-created as a new active link once again, and I can then just post the relevant data back into that. That would be greatly preferred, I guess.

Thanks so much in advance to anyone who can assist! I'd have guessed it was a pretty simple matter?

admin [at] stampboards.com

[P_I]

Can you recreate it using http://web.archive.org/web/202401142116 ... hp?t=97479

Maybe someone with a bit more technical knowledge can point you in the direction of how it might be possible to recreate the necessary data table rows to rebuild it.

[ozstamps]

Thanks very much - did look at that waybackmachine site earlier week as possible option #1, but the deleted thread was very image heavy, and none of the images were captured by them, only text, and their last indexing of our board was a month back anyway. (The link you added here was 4 years old and not of the correct thread that was deleted.)

But maybe I was not 100% clear .. I have already tediously re-created all the data and images, which is now all on a standalone new thread - I just need to find a way for those clicking on 100 existing exterior links to -

(Link removed by OP as the re-direction issue now resolved - many thanks!)

To 'land' on the new page, via a re-direction of some kind, or better still, have someone who knows what they are doing, in return for some beers and pizzas (!) to re-create that php?t=97479 url - and I can then load the new data into it, and job done.

Glen

[SpIdErPiGgY]

You can use .httaccess

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/art ... ccess-file

"Redirecting a single URL"

[ozstamps]

Again, please excuse my total tech ignorance .. this stuff I truly have no clue about.

This '.httaccess' - is that something that is done via the phpBB ACP, or via the web host for the site?

Sorry, I really am totally knowledgeless in these areas.

[warmweer]

The most simple way to restore a deleted topic is to import the posts and the topic from a recent database backup.

So the workflow is:

disable your board
take a database backup (in case something goes wrong and your have to restart)
create a new empy database
import the recent database backup into the new database
Create 2 SQLs, 1 to get the relevant data from the topics_table, 2 to get the relevant data from the posts_table.

Since you know the topic_id, export that topic_record (from the topics_table) and also export the posts_data from the posts_table (the criterium for both = topic_id = 97479.
Then import those records into your current database.

Once everything's done you can enable the board
Then resync post and topic counts. (ACP).

It's fairly easy but your board has 11 million posts and if you're not used to working with phpMyAdmin (or similar) i'ld advise to find someone experienced to do this.

[ozstamps]

Many thanks as usual for the good advice - the re-direction issue is now resolved - much appreciated!