! Removed posts are not at all removed

Account and policies
1

:exploding_head: Whenever you delete a post from micro.blog, I’ve seen that it is not actually removed.
I’ve also checked for the uploads and apparently they are deleted, but after around 24h or so.

Apparently there’s a bug (I hope) or something that keeps the posts on the micro.blog servers even after the user decides to delete them…

Example #1

I’ve uploaded an image on 2021-11-16 at 17h52 :

==> https://podiboq.micro.blog/uploads/2021/bcb9230142.jpg

I’ve deleted the image at 2021-11-16 at 17h55

:warning: 2021-11-17 at 19h15 the image is still available (yes, it’s an image with the text “DELETED” :roll_eyes:)

The image is not removed immediately, but apparently, after a long period, it will finally become inaccessible. So, ok… I think this works, but it takes a long time.

Example #2

Here are some posts that are no longer theoretically on my micro.blog because I’ve deleted them few weeks ago (at least they do not appear on the blog or in the “admin panel”) :

:information_source: I cannot add too many links, so sorry about the weird format

  • h ttps://podiboq.micro.blog/2021/05/08/what-a-beautiful.html
    • for this one I’ve removed the image from the uploads panel - the image seems to be gone, but not the post
  • h ttps://podiboq.micro.blog/2021/09/12/232923.html
  • h ttps://podiboq.micro.blog/2021/09/23/years.html

Example #3

I’ve then tried the same thing on my test micro.blog and I’m having the same behavior. After deleting all the posts and all the images, the posts I’ve deleted yesterday (on 2021-11-16) are still available :

  • h ttps://podiboq-test.micro.blog/2020/11/24/welcome-to-your.html
  • h ttps://podiboq-test.micro.blog/2020/11/24/test-simple.html
  • h ttps://podiboq-test.micro.blog/2021/11/16/deleted-post-number.html
  • h ttps://podiboq-test.micro.blog/2021/11/16/140524.html
  • h ttps://podiboq-test.micro.blog/2020/11/24/test-long-post.html - the image seems to be gone, but not the post

Now here’s the long story, explaining how I’ve found out about this issue :

Some time ago I’ve had a bad day, and I’ve decided to remove from my micro.blog some posts that I considered more personal.

Later I’ve regretted doing this, so I contacted the support to ask if I can restore these posts. The answer was no, but Manton gave me some alternatives :

mbsupport
mbsupport1212×830 76.5 KB

I’ve found a backup I’ve made some time ago, I imported it, but I thought nothing happened (got no success / error message). Few days/weeks later, I’ve seen that it actually worked, but I found myself with a lot of duplicate posts. Oooops…

So I went on the « Posts » page, and I’ve started to delete the duplicates.

It is at that moment that I’ve seen that the posts I was deleting weren’t really deleted and that they were still available on my micro.blog when accessing the original link…

So, I went to the Wayback Machine, found a post that I have deleted back then and when I’ve opened the link I was very surprised to see that the post is actually still on my micro.blog. Sort of, because I can access it via its link, but not visible neither on the blog pages, archive page or in the admin panel, « Posts » section.

1 Like
2

I’ve had this repeatedly happen with me too, for uploads, posts and even pages. :confused:

3

It’s a little disturbing, because I feel “lied” when I’m asking to delete a post, it says “OK, it’s deleted”, but in reality it is still available (even if you have to know the link)…

It’s true that if you’re having the “Internet Archive” enabled, everything’s there anyway, but still…

4

@manton can you please say if this is normal behavior or just a bug?

And if it’s a bug, any idea when will it be fixed? :slight_smile:

Thank you.

5

There are a couple things happening here… Short answer: it must be a bug. There is sometimes a delay when deleting a post before the permalink is removed from your blog, but if it’s not cleaned up “soon” then that’s definitely a problem. I’ll look into this again.

Also, if anyone sees this, feel free to send me an email at help@micro.blog and I can manually clear anything that is lingering around.

6

Thank you for your answer. I really hope you’ll manage to find the cause of this bug and fix it for good :+1:

8

I’ve made some improvements to this and think we should be closer to having it fixed everywhere.

9

I confirm the problem. It has happened to me in the past, and it happened 2-3 days ago the last time I posted (that I made a mistake and redid the post).

The symptoms are similar to those described above. The post is said to get deleted, but then it still shows when the blog is accessed. Reloading the micro.blog backend also shows the duplicate. Every single time this has happened to me I’ve managed to kill the duplicate in the end (by re-deleting it). So I guess there’s some caching involved in the issue.

10

I have an even weirder issue to report with deleted posts… I had created a hosted micro.blog site back in 2017 but ended up not really using it aside from one test setup post. A few days ago, I decided to try out Micro.blog again for real, so I deleted my old hosted site and created a new one. I was told this would permanently delete all of my old site’s content, which is what I wanted, so I could start from scratch.

At some point today, that test setup post very suddenly reappeared on my website! Despite this, it’s not listed in my account’s post, which means I have no discernible way to try to delete it again.

@manton Any updates to share on deleted posts still appearing? My ghost post from my previous site has come back to haunt me here

11

Upon further testing, the ghost post is always visible with that permalink, but it seems to randomly vanish or reappear from my site’s archive between site rebuilds :confused:

12

I’ve cleared the cached files that were still showing up sometimes. Everything should be good now. I’m not sure why they weren’t deleted, must be a bug somewhere that I’ll look into.

1 Like