Support » Plugin: Broken Link Checker » Removing broken link removed all comments

  • Resolved bobinoz

    (@bobinoz)


    Hi

    Firstly I have to say I don’t think this is specifically a broken link checker problem, but I do think it is worth mentioning here because in the act of removing a link I actually removed every single comment on my website. This is what happened.

    I was tidying up broken links through broken links checker, a plug-in that I have been using on my site for quite some time and think is very good. This time though, I deleted a broken link that someone had inserted in the website box when adding a comment, something I’ve done many times before, and then I went to the front end to check that it was gone. Not only was it gone, but there were no comments on that page at all. Zero comments were showing.

    Then I checked all my other pages and posts, they were all showing zero comments. Literally thousands of comments had been wiped off my website. All my comments were still in the backend, I could see them in admin. I spoke to my hosts who did a database restore for me and also informed me that what had happened was the post ID, which is used to associate comments with posts, was set to 0 for almost all comments.

    I don’t know what that means, but I deactivated the plug-in and then, after everything had been restored properly, return to the comment admin page to clear up the broken comments manually. You will see a little cross next to the website address that users add when they make a comment, if you click on it it will delete the URL. That’s what I did, and again all of my comments from the front end disappeared.

    Now, I assume, and hopefully this plug-in is author can confirm, that if you delete a comment through broken link checker it probably goes through the same process as clicking on that little cross in WordPress. So, as I’ve mentioned, I don’t think it’s a plug-in problem, but it’s a problem with WordPress and maybe just my WordPress installation.

    My host is bewildered as am I.

    Anybody got any ideas on this one?

    Cheers, Bob

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

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