This was really odd user interface feature.
I deleted a forum today, because I thought that was the only way to merge forums. Since you guys didn't put in a "merge forums" or "copy forum posts to another forum" button, I assumed deleting forums will ask me to move posts inside elsewhere or delete them. So I deleted the forum, and now all my threads are gone from that forum.
I thought it was going to ask me where to move all the posts inside the forum, but it didn't.
I was worried about this when a javascript confirmation came up, but this is why I have a backup. Regardless, developers should know that this is a major lack of feature.
I have a ton of forums I need to merge together because they are the same stuff. How do I do this?
This think this is what you mean.
UPDATE mybb_threads SET fid=X WHERE fid=Y;
UPDATE mybb_posts SET fid=X WHERE fid=Y;
X = new forum id number
Y = old forum id number
BE SURE TO DO A BACKUP BEFORE RUNNING QUERY
-Labrocca
Yes, I think so, thank you very much.
I just thought there would be a feature to do this already.
Maybe something to think about for 1.6.1 ?
Outta curiosity, why do you assume something before reading documentation / the manual and then be angry at developers for your mistakes?
Edit: It even asks you eventually with an alert whether you wanna really delete the forum. What did you expect would happen by pressing ok? Yet another dialog?
OnTopic: Afaik the merge plugin allows to merge forums as well.
I'm not angry at developers, I was just asking why they implemented it this way. They have a dialog where moving threads and there's options like "should I copy? or move? leave link?"
Why are you assuming I was angry?
Yeah, but that confirmation didn't make sense. In other software deleting a whole container of posts would require further dialogs asking if they want to delete everything, or move them somewhere. It's just something that's expected in forum software.
Honestly, have you ever heard of anyone, clicking delete on a whole forum filled with thousands of posts/threads?? I understand clicking delete on an empty forum... But who deletes a 1000+ threads knowing that google will report tons of 404 errors??? It should be assumed that the administrator of a forum, doesn't ever want to create 1000+ 404 errors on google.
I'm sorry you misinterpreted my "internet tone".
Why would you assume it would do that if it didn't say anything about it?? It's been like that for over two years at least and we've not been bombarded with complaints about it.
You can already just go into a forum in 1.6, select all the threads, and move them somewhere else.
What do you expect to happen if you delete something?? It deletes the file and it's contents! The same with forums, you delete the forum and the contents are gone.
Yes, I know that a delete option usually means delete. However since there was no Merge forums option anywhere, and there was no move all threads somewhere in the admin panel, I thought perhaps there is a mechanism (much like when you Move threads, it asks if you want to copy or move), that it will ask if you want to move the topics to a new forum and just delete the container only.
It's just what I expected; I'm sorry for assuming it to be more complicated than it is. But I took the risk because I already had a backup because I knew there was a good chance it would go ahead and delete everything inside too.
I think it would be a good feature to do the behavior I expected for future releases. It would not even be half a page of code.