WARNING! RSS Multi Importer may delete all content!
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Hi!
I´m sorry to say, but a few minutes ago your plugin deleted all posts and pages from my website! 2 months of hard work were gone just by clicking the “delete posts”-button on the second tab of the autoposter config page. I had problems because auto posts in draft didn´t work so I tried to start new and clicked that button although no posts were listed on that page. After that all feeds and the contents from the feed db were gone – I expected only the feed contents would be deleted. After that I discovered all other contents including the contents from other plugins have been gone, too. :-(((((
I´m happy my backup worked, but the work from this day, new signups and payments are lost. So the first thing I did was to deactivate RSS Multi Importer.
I´m working with your plugin for more than a year now and I have another page were I never had problems. Maybe it´s the new version 3.0.1 – you really should check this.
Best regards,
Jan
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Thank God I am not alone. I have been experiencing this every night where posts, pages, images and even the logo keep disappearing. I have used this plugin now with great success over the last two years and Allen has been great with ongoing updates and support. I am hoping for a resolution soon.
Hello, I have experienced today that trashing posts pr pages (having this plugin installed) using the standard WP GUI, causes random post/page delete. No autopost active in my case.
However, now, before trashing a page/post I deactivate the plugin and then I re-activate it
WP 3.9.2
RiccardoThis happened to me as well. Almost all of my content has been deleted, including menu, custom post type content, pages, and posts. I have tracked down the source of my content being deleted to this plugin
Second this thread – plugin just wiped pages off my site. Not even trashed simply gone!
I’m going to have to throw my hat in here as well. I recently installed the plugin over a fresh WP install and subdomain. I finally got it working the way I wanted and everything was fine. I added some feeds, refreshed, everything was good, added more feeds refreshed, everything was good. (I think I have about 6 or 7 total feeds in there not a whole lot). I waited a day because I wanted to see if the updating would work. I refreshed the page to see if any feeds/posts updated and all my pictures were gone. Nothing in the media folder existed anymore, even the default images I had uploaded myself. Any idea why that is?
Another site I have just experienced this issue. The first site I resolved by defining the expiration date of imported posts. Actually, I just turned it on and then turned it off and it seems to be holding that “off” setting and nothing has been deleted since. I am going to try that on the second site that is experiencing the issue. It still doesn’t explain why my images were deleted.
Another note: The link in auto post “manage what posts to keep here” is giving me an error when clicking on it.
Add me to the growing list as well. Had 20 less posts on the site when I got up two days ago, had much more gone a week or two before that, and yesterday a contributor’s post pending review disappeared. Nothing is going in trash, just permanent removal.
WTF?Yes, as soon as I upgraded to Version 3 it deleted all of my content – I had 24 pages and 43 posts and it left me with 7 pages and 0 posts. The first time this happened I had no idea what was going on. Thankfully I had a backup of the database. I restored the database and found out a couple of days later it happened again. I restored again, and started checking every hour to see if it would happen again. Yesterday morning and again this morning I woke up to the same thing – 7 pages and 0 posts. I disabled the plugin, knowing that it had to be this plugin. It was the only plugin that I have that deletes content from the database by design, and this started happening right after I upgraded to the new version 3.x which stores RSS feeds in the database in the same table as other content. From a design standpoint, this is a terrible architecture. You should have added your own table to the database and leave the rest of the content alone. My guess is you have some malformed SQL DELETE statement that is removing more content than it should. Too bad – this plugin worked perfectly before you changed it. Now I have removed it from all sites and will find another RSS aggregator.
This plugin is updated on a voluntary basis, it’s important to understand that before being too harsh on the developer. If you want a commercial alternative that has quicker support please try out WP RSS Aggregator.
In response to jeangalea – I understand your point, but from the perspective of a professional software developer, this is a very serious bug that can have catastrophic consequences for real businesses. You can’t deliver an update of this magnitude, with an entirely new processing and logic flow to production without extensive testing. And the fact that it is used by so many sites – Downloads: 328,743 – this is just about as serious as a bug can be. Imagine if an accounting program released an update that deleted data from your accounting database. Updates to all software programs are voluntary, for the most part. The vendor is not responsible – according to the EULA – for any loss of data, loss of business, etc. But… they also know that none of that matters to the end users who would quickly find a new accounting program and effectively “vote” them out of existence. No, this is a major screw-up and should never have happened. The developer needs to test, test, and test again, especially where databases and data modifications are concerned. Because even though it is the user’s responsibility to back up their data, not everyone does it, and many people (myself included) falsely believe their Hosting provider is doing backups as part of their own disaster recovery plan. That may be true… but that doesn’t mean they will retrieve any missing or damaged database file for you.
@jboutot I definitely understand what you are saying, however many WordPress users also tend to expect too much from free plugins here on .org.
To develop and support a plugin which is so popular is insanely tough work. Consider that the developer of this plugin is not even a pure programmer but created the plugin to scratch his own itch (my own plugin missed some features at the time so he forked it and added them) while learning along the way, and continued improving the plugin to satisfy users’ requests. Moreover he has a full time job so this is a side thing, just take a look at the number of requests this plugin receives and you’ll get the idea of the work involved. Personally I think it is unsustainable and such plugins only continue to exist due to the generosity of the developers.
Now what can users do? Be aware that there are always limitations in free, if you’re building a site and a particular plugin is critical to that site’s functionality, consider using a premium plugin or contact the free plugin’s developer and offer him a donation or ask him if he’d be able to support you for a fee.
Since you mentioned hosting, it’s a similar thing, I once used cheap hosting and you wouldn’t believe but one fine day the company just vanished in thin air taking with it all its clients’ (thousands) websites which were irrecoverable. I learnt the lesson and nowadays I am glad to pay more and sleep well at night knowing that my sites are hosted at sustainable hosts who earn enough to be able to support a professional staff that knows what they are doing and that they have the proper infrastructure in place.
Just some of my thoughts, I’ll probably delve deeper into this topic on WP Mayor at a later stage, as I honestly think there needs to be more awareness about the plugin ecosystem and what you should expect from free vs premium plugins.
Hi All
thanks Jean for helping out here….the code was beta tested by many people, and clearly what is happening isn’t generalized to everybody since otherwise everybody would have the exact same problem (i.e., installing the plugin would wipe out your posts, etc.) there is nothing in the code that I’m aware of that would do this – and it’s likely a plugin conflict with something else you are running on your server, or as Jean said, if you are on cheap server that could be a potential problem.Now, that I’m back from my retreat, perhaps you can give me login access to your site and I’ll see if I can find what’s going on, or if you want high support, then go to WP Mayor (the link above) and use their plugin.
Since @JBulot pointed out there was obviously a problem with my plugin deleting all the content on a web site, I decided to test this out using my own web site, that has all the information about the plugin, etc…which would be a horrible to lose if the plugin didn’t work. This is on a hostgator shared host…here is what happens when I do the actions that @deeluuxe said was done that deleted all the posts and pages:
Allen, is it possible to downgrade to a stable version. I just had this same occurrence happen to me, all posts were deleted, just vanished, no where to be found. I can send a list of all plugins, if you think this could be a compatibility problem, etc.
Thanks for all of your help.
let’s try this…please give me admin access by going to
http://www.allenweiss.com/contact
pw: gonecampingThat way I can see for myself what is going on as I cannot reproduce this problem on any of my servers…thanks.
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