I'm currently on MT 3.1, and have four blogs. However, only three are showing in Movable Type, even though all the data from the missing blog is still in the MySQL database. The only recent major activities have been the upgrade to 3.1 and deleting an unconnected blog (which has deleted successfully from movabletype and MySQL). I've done nothing to the missing blog...!

I'm having the same problem.... I had three weblogs, deleted one and now one of the other two is hidden.

I am using MT 3.11

The weblog is visible in the blacklist plugin as one of the active weblogs, but I cannot access the log from the main MT menu. Nor is it visible in the pulldown or any other listing of weblogs on the system.

However, even though my lists only show one weblog, the main MT page still says I have 2 weblogs, one author.

Yep, same here - can someone help here, this has quite serious implications for my website!

I too am having this problem. I thought it was either a file or database problem. I deleted all the tables in the MySql database, and all of the MT files, and reloaded the whole kit and kaboodle.

I then spent a couple of hours rebuilding the templates in what was now a NEW installation of MT 3.1. It rebuilt and the blog was showing. I closed MT31 to do some other things, reopenend it an WHOOPS - the only blog showing is "First Blog"

I am doing all this in a backup site (thankfully). I was trying to get everything running smoothely before converting my active site, but so far I am going nowhere in a hurry. I am also getting very frustrated.

I'm going brain dead.

I created the second blog as "melody" so when I logged in under my login it didn't show.

Smack me with a noodle.

I gave myself permissions, logged back in as Melody to delete Melody ... logged back out then in under my login.

I still don't know if I took care of my other problems which led me to do the install though.

bump

Hi folks,

I want to troubleshoot this issue. For reference, can you let us know what database system you're using, and any plugins that you have installed? Also, see if you can reproduce the problem on a second installation with the same setup (including plugins) and then try uninstalling those plugins to see if the same behavior exists.

Thanks
Ezra

Hi,

I am using MySQL, and version 3.1 of MT. I have the MT Blacklist 2.01b plugin and MT Notifier 2.2.

I had this problem as well. I did the rebuild all twice and it worked - entries showed up in mt.cgi. Don't know why and don't know if it will work for you. It happenened to me twice, and the double rebuild worked for both. the login screen, but did

Also just found this discussion on the forum. May be some hints there.

I'm confused as to how that topic relates? It's about imports; the problem here is deleting one blog causing deletion/hiding of others.

Sorry, maybe I was confused about the problem, but it seemd related to me. In the odyssey to get MT 3.11 up and running, I have had disappearing blogs, disappearing entries, categories that don't work, comments that don't work, and plugins that don't work. I do know that all of these can have a multiplicy of causes, but that in working on the invisible blog, some the the disappearing entries discussions helped me track down the problems.

I also think there is a bug in there somewhere, and my guess is that it is tied to the "dynamic" rebuilds, but I am no programmer so this is just an uneducated opinion on my part.

I apologize if I took anyone off course.

Any further news on this? Haven't been able to update my blog for 2 weeks now...

*bump*

Surely this is an urgent bug!

It seems that when a blog is deleted, it removes your author permission from another blog too. I now have two blogs I cannot see!

Further investigation - in the MySQL database, the missing blogs have IDs of 2 and 5. My "author" login indicates that I only have permission to access blog ID 4, which is indeed the only one I can see on the movabletype screen...

It seems there should be a way to add the permissions to those blogs directly through your database. I have phpAdmin through my host which allows me to access my databases. If you go into the mt_author table, you could manually change the permissions to match the blogs you do have access to.

I have no idea how you do this with any other systems. I had to do this with one of my blogs because I didn't give myself access on setup to all of my blogs and deleted "Melody" before I had.

You're right. I've changed the BlogID on the table to "2" so that I can modify the blog I haven't been able to access. I've no idea how to enable access to more than one blog though - can you have multiple values (blogIDs) in one field?!

At least one user was able to restore the permissions to his author name for the "missing" blogs using MT Medic, so anyone experiencing this problem should give that a try.

If I understand author permissions, or the My Sql tables, within any given installation of MT you can have multiple blogs, with multiple authors for each. It look like this in in the mt_permission table. Each blog and author id is in there. It might be easier to modify this through MT Medic, though I am not sure if it works with 3.11. Does anybody know?

Well, yes, that's why I just suggested it.

Shelley, it seems that you have pointed me to the resolution for the permissions, but I am still without 2 weblogs (and no way of getting them back except 2 week old backups) and no confirmation of this as a bug. Is it a bug? It could cause huge implications when people delete blogs...

Well, I'd say it's a bug in that deleting two blogs when you only want to delete one is not intended behavior.

But we haven't found anything right off in the Movable Type code which would cause this, so that's why Ezra was asking about setups and plugins, to see if there is another common factor.

I just upgraded to 3.11 from 2.661 and have "lost" a blog after deleting another. The lost blog was there when my upgrade was complete and the only plugin I have running is MTBlacklist

I had this same problem today, thought I fixed it using MT Medic but when I logged back in to MT after restoring my author permissions absolutely everything was gone. no templates, no entries, no categories. the config was still correct, that's all. tried to export entries, obviously didn't work (blank screen). everything was still showing on the site though so I cut and pasted everything thinking I'd start over. re-created all templates etc. and re-built all files, but when I tried to add a new entry it wouldn't show on the site unless I manually rebuilt the index template. I figured I'd already lost all the information about could re-create it so I deleted the blog and guess what! lost another one! this one much more important as I had TONS of information up.
general info - I upgraded from 3.11 to 3.12 the day after it came out with no problems (2 existing blogs at that time). I'm using MySQL database and have tried repairing it using my server's user interface, but I'm not a db person plugins are blacklist, word count, if comments, now playing, better spam protect, if empty, other blog (installed but not in use), multiblog (installed but not in use), and photo gallery (installed but not in use).
please help, cutting and pasting everything from the blog that just disappeared would be horrendous. I'm not using MT Medic on this one in case there's a way to recover that blog without losing all the info like last time.

From my testing, this appears to be a problem with MT Blacklist, specifically the Groups feature.

I spent a lot of time creating and deleting blogs without any plugins installed, and had no problems.

Then I installed MT Blacklist and continued creating and deleting, but still, no odd behavior.

Then, I turned to the MTB Groups feature. I created a new group and moved two test blogs over into it. Then I deleted one of those blogs, and both blogs in the group vanished from the Main Menu.

The unintentionally deleted blog was still in the mt_blogs database, and MT Medic could restore my author permissions to it, but everything else was gone from the blog (templates and so forth).

well, thank you for the extensive testing...but I've never had the Groups feature of MTBlacklist turned on (no need for it). maybe that info will help someone else, tho.
:sigh:

Well that was just the one scenario I came across during that round of testing. The important thing was that no matter how many times I created and deleted various blogs in a pure (i.e., no plugins installed) installation, no blogs other than the one I'd chosen were deleted.

I just did another test. This time I created two new blogs. I left one of them in the default group and placed the other in the new group I'd previously created (which included the blog I "restored" permissions to after it vanished the first time).

Then I deleted the new blog from the default group. Both it and the other blog I just created and moved to the new group disappeared.

I restored permissions with MT Medic to the "hiding" blog. I then moved it and the other blog (previously restored) from the new group back to the default group. I then deleted the first restored blog. It was the only one that was removed.

So still, no matter what I'm doing here, it seems related to that new group.

Okay. I now was able to get the behavior to happen by having only Groups turned on, but not having any actual groups other than the default.

I turned Groups OFF. Deleted a blog. Things went fine (one blog deleted).

I went and turned Groups ON (just a toggle change, no new groups actually created). Deleted a blog. Two vanished.

I created three more blogs (because they all keep going away!). When I go to configure MTB, there are five blogs showing, although there are only four on my list now - one is still hidden by lack of permissions. So I get it back with MT Medic.

I switch OFF support for blacklist groups. Delete a weblog. Two vanish (bad).

I switch ON support for blacklist groups. Delete a weblog. One vanishes (good).

So there doesn't seem to be a consistent pattern here between ON and OFF, only the fact that I'm playing with the Groups setting, or Groups configuration.

Hi shelley,

Sadly, I haven't got Groups turned on, but I get the double-deleting error...

As I said, it does not appear to be dependent upon the Groups feature being ON per se. That's how it appeared initially, but I could turn it on or off and still end up with the delete problem.

Yet another test:

I just configured MTB to be "Inactive" and deleted three weblogs in a row - and those were the only three to disappear.

I created three more new ones, configured MTB to be "Active", deleted a weblog - and TWO disappeared.

I created two more new blogs, configured MTB to be "Inactive", deleted two weblogs - and those were the only two to disappear.

Created more blogs. This time when I turned MTB to "Active", I was able to safely delete one blog. So I turned Groups to ON - deleted another weblog and it blew two of them away.

I don't know what further testing to do at this point that will be more definitive. Unless someone else can duplicate this behavior in a clean Movable Type installation with absolutely no plugins installed, then there's no reason at this point to suspect this is a bug in our code, unless Jay can find something there that makes MT and MTB not like each other.

Following this thread has inspired me to periodically save a copy of my customized templates, and export my blog, saving the text files on my harddrive.

I now have a text copy of templates and import text files saved.

That way restoring the blog is a fairly easy task...

I have the same issue (or did until I restored my MySQL (4.0.16) database). I deleted 3 unused blogs after update and two others had their permissions removed. I added the permissions back using MT-Medic and then I used a SQL query tool and determined that the entries were gone as well. I have a tar file of the DB in question and can also tar up the current MT install. As this was an upgrade (from 2.2-2.5-2.6.x-3.121), there are a number of plugins. The only new plugin was MT-Blacklist 2.0.1b.

We thought we'd accidentally hit the wrong weblog to delete, so we restored and did the same thing again and had the same results, so it's repeatable.

I had the same problem (deleted 4 blogs and lost 8) and thankfully, my host www.tigertech.net restored the site so I'm back in business.

But it would be good to know if the MT-Blacklist plugin glitch gets fixed. Has the author, Jay Allen, been informed of/track this topic thread?

Jay Allen has addressed this issue.

Okay...I was trying to fix some other problems and set up a new dummy blog, then (in my infinite wisdom) deleted the dummy blog. So guess what happened...?

Anyway, I have installed the updated version of Mt-Blacklist which does actually "see" the old blog, but I still don't have access to it from within MT.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? I've looked around everywhere for updates on this issue.

What can I do? All suggestions gratefully accepted.

In my experience, it deleted the contents of the blog. It's supposed to be fixed in the latest MT-Blacklist.

Restore from backup,

Thanks. I got a response from Jay Allen on this issue. He said that if the data is still in the database MT-Medic can fix it. If the data is no longer there, there is nothing that can be done.

In my case the data was still there (I checked using the MySQL management/editing tools available through my host) but I had already asked them to do a restore.

If anyone else has this problem and has not got the upgrade and accidentally deleted your blog. Run MT-Medic and see if you can fix it before you do a restore.

Good luck.

Ok... I didn't notice that this was a known problem until it was too late. So I too deleted a dummy blog and subsequently lost my main blog. However... It seems most people here are using MySQL for their databases. I wanted to post to make people aware the problem also happens when you're using flatfile databases!

I used MT-Medic as instructed and regained access to see the blog, however as noted previously nothing there. But I did find it very interesting to note that even though nothing was there, I downloaded all the db files from the server and viewed them in wordpad... And I can see the text of my data clearly all there.

I'm going to attempt to recover my data from these files. However I reallize it's going to be a long proccess, however I don't have any recent backups of my db directory so it's my only hope.

I had the deletion problem. I managed to make my blog visible again using MT-Medic, but now none of my templates or posts or comments or anything show up.

Has anyone figure out what to do about this yet?

Thanks in advance!

IF, and I do mean IF, your posts from your deleted blog are still in the mt_entry table, you can look at the entry_blog_id field to ensure that the proper blog number is associated with the entry. By putting the right number in that field, the post, & all the information in that line, will show up under that blog in the MT interface.

My experience, however, is that your information was likely deleted.

If you're fortunate enough to have a good host that backs up your databases, you can have them send you a recent copy and just 'import' the data right into the table and you should be back up and runing.

This topic has been active since September of last year and it still hasn't been addressed by Six Apart?

I just deleted one blog to comply with your license and ended up losing 2. This is an extremely serious bug in this software!

Not only do I lose one website managed by this software, I have to now spend countless hours trying to restore 4 years of data, and hold off on a crucial launch of another site.

This is unacceptable.

Unfortunately, we couldn't fix it because the bug was never in Movable Type (Six Apart software), it was in MT Blacklist (not Six Apart software). But we did address it, by testing it thoroughly (I did that personally over many hours), and thus helping Jay to pinpoint the problem.

And then fortunately, he released a fix for it.

There has to be a better way of keeping track of these problems. I don't have time, nor did I even think of, checking web logs for MT and MT recommended plug-ins bug reports.

Anyway, I only lost a few hours including lunch. My web host restored my data from the last back-up. I cannot recommend Pair hosting enough. Exemplary customer service.

This problem has struck me this week.

I've done the mt-medic, this restores access to the blog, but the entries and comments( the entire reason for the blog ) are not found by the interface.

I have all the data for the entries, but I am at a loss as to how to get the MT interface to recognize these entries once again. Is there a solution to this?

I must say I am highly disappointed in Six Apart for not notifying customers of this problem. It is not enough to simply post something here, the company should have contacted all paid customers and alerted them to this problem months ago when the problem was first identified and again when the cause was determined. I understand it is third party code, but that code was disseminated on the companies site in plug-in packs. Despite the following:

It is evident that Six Apart does test plugins, else why would you offer them on the website, then post in the forum that you have tested it quite extensively regarding a major bug?

If this was September through November 2004 it would have been less of an issue, but this is June 2005. The company had full knowledge of a critical bug in a widely used plugin that they disseminate directly and failed to notify paying customers that all of their work could be lost. This is the definition of negligence. A simple email would have sufficed back in November/December.

/Rant Now does anyone have any solution to allow the movable type interface to once again recognize entries and comments that are still in the database?