The Royal Family Topic Disappearance

[MattTech]

Hi all...

I wanted to post about the problems we experienced last night with "The Royal Family" topic disappearing.

Unfortunately, we had a bug that meant, under a very specific set of circumstances, topics could get deleted, along with all of the threads and replies in those topics - this is what happened last night. Luckily, we were able to get a fix in place pretty quickly that reinstated all threads and another fix to restore posting ability by 9pm last night so we hope that you weren't too badly impacted by the outage.

Contrary to some of the theories, we weren't taken down by men in grey from the palace, nor was it a hacking attempt. In short, we had a bug in our code for our new follow topics feature that broke something else - a cock up, not a conspiracy.

We're really sorry that this happened, and I wanted to personally reassure everyone that we've investigated this in depth internally today to ensure that a problem like this doesn't happen again.

Thanks

Matt
Mumsnet Tech Team

Found how to do it. Thanks!

I still can't find the topic @MattTech only read threads that appear in Active. The topic does not appear in the list for me. (iPhone, using the app).

Well I never....

LOL

I can imagine the frothing that went down over this, nicely done.

Hi @Cismyfatarse

If you log out of the app and back in again that should resolve the problem for you in the app.

When the app loads, it caches the list of topics. What is likely to have happened is that you loaded it when the topic was deleted and it’s not picked up that it’s back.

Logging out and in again will force it to reload the list of topics.

Hope that helps! 🙂

wildly misinterprets with no real tech knowledge at all

So.... what you’re saying is, one account was keeping that board going?... 😂

Hi @ArcaneWireless

I’ve confirmed that this was indeed a problem at our email provider’s end.

They had a problem over there today that delayed sending some emails, and when they processed the backlog they sent out some blank emails.

They’ve fixed the issue now so everything should be back to normal 🙂

Thanks

😂

That’s not exactly what I’m saying… But the bug could have caused a lot more disruption than it did!

Thankfully we have a very robust backup setup and disaster recovery plan in place that helped to restore the content as soon as we were alerted that it had gone 🙂

The other thread

@MattTech I did that. No change.

Cheers for the info Matt.

Much appreciated. 😊

I second this.

Oh god if only

@Cismyfatarse That does seem strange. I can see it in the iOS app.

I’m away from a computer at the moment so can’t check at my end, but have you by any chance hidden the topic on either the web site or mobile web?

Aww c'mon Matt, we all know the mod team bunged you a tenner to just switch it off for a bit 😂

@MattTech No. Not hidden it. But, weirdly when I checked, there were loads of hidden threads that I swear I did not hide.

I have a few quid I could put in a fund to extend it.

😂 I can neither confirm or deny if that was the case!

If they had I might have asked them to do it during normal working hours though! 🤣

@MattTech I want to steal you to join my tech team purely for your lovely customer management! (I'm sure you've got a great skill set to match)

☺️ What a lovely thing to say! Thank you so much!

@MattTech It has reappeared while I sleep. I hope you weren't up too late fixing it.

Excellent! I'm so glad that's all fixed now 😃Please let me know if you have any more problems.

Has it gone again I can't search for it? Have I hidden it by accident?

I can't see it either

I can’t see it either