Hi, for whatever reason the forum freshness is wrong for only one of my forums. My first troubleshooting step will be to run the recalculate forum freshness repair tool, but I see that it creates substantial DB overhead. I’m not particularly worried about the connection count or anything, but is there a “proper” procedure for running these repair tools? Is there any risk of them quitting midway through and corrupting the data, and should we be creating db backups before running them? Just want to be clear on what the risks are before running them on a live site.
Thanks

[@robin-w Moderator 2 years, 11 months ago]

I would always recommend a backup before actions that affect the db.

However all the repair tools affect relationships and counts, they don’t amend or delete forum, topic or reply entries.

Running recalculate freshness will update a single database entry for each topic and forum.

If you have substantial numbers of forums, topics and replies this can slow your site whilst running, but in practice with server speeds nowadays I suspect you’ll not notice – but run at a quiet site time anyway 🙂

[@ewd910 Participant 2 years, 11 months ago]

Will do, thanks

[@ewd910 Participant 2 years, 11 months ago]

Unfortunately this did not help my problem. The freshness is still incorrect. Is it relevant that the forum with the incorrect freshness is a private forum? Invisible to users who are not in a private group, using your “bbp private groups” plugin

[@robin-w Moderator 2 years, 11 months ago]

It should not, but may well be 🙂

Can I ask what is wrong – ie is there a newer entry, so freshness is out of date, or it has freshness related to a topic no longer visible etc.

Are sub forums involved ?

That would help me decide how best to proceed

[@ewd910 Participant 2 years, 11 months ago]

There are sub forums involved. The one that is considered the “freshest” has a sub forum inside of that as well, but that forum actually has the oldest most recent post.

1-_
    A-_
        A'
 -_
    B

 -_
    C

 -_
    D

So forum 1’s freshness is displayed as the freshness of A’, but in reality it should be the freshness of D. Hopefully that makes sense.

[@ewd910 Participant 2 years, 11 months ago]

Hi Robin, were you able to replicate this? I’m thinking this should be broken out into its own forum post, seems like a bug to me.

[@robin-w Moderator 2 years, 11 months ago]

Apologies for delay.

I have seen this from time to time with only one website- it seems to happen where a forum has topics and sub-forums as well (as opposed to the higher level being a category), but since I only get involved when it has happened, I’ve never managed to get to a set of circumstances that will replicate the problem. For the site with the issue, they generally either wait for a further post which corrects, or one of the moderators creates a new reply to a topic which fixes. I have suspected it also relates to spam posts, as I have often found them in the mix when the issue occurs.

[@ewd910 Participant 2 years, 11 months ago]

Got it, no spam in this case. I’ll see what happens when a new reply is posted.
Thanks!