How to restore 300 posts to previous edit history?

[Alfa1]

A prominent member edited out the text of over 300 posts and thereby wrecking hundreds of threads. I need to restore these posts. How can I do this? Is there a query I can use?

[Lats]

1. Restore your backup to a different database, say test1.

2. In phpMyAdmin, select test1 and click on the post table. Go to the Operations tab and find the Copy table to dialog box. In the dropdown box, select your vb_forums database and and type post77 into the text box. Make sure structure and data is select and click go.

3. You will now have two post tables in your vb_forums database. In phpMyAdmin, select the sql tab and enter the following...

UPDATE
    post 
INNER JOIN
    post77
ON
    post.userid = post77.userid
SET
    post.pagetext = post77.pagetext
WHERE
    post.userid = XXX

Change XXX to your prominent member userid.

[oly51]

I had a member wig out and do this a few years back. I set the time limit to edit a thread to 24 hours after posting.

A prominent member edited out the text of over 300 posts and thereby wrecking hundreds of threads. I need to restore these posts. How can I do this? Is there a query I can use?

[Alfa1]

The member did not change all his posts and various posts have irrelevant post edit history. All edits where done within the time span of 3 hours.

[Clickfinity]

Thanks Lats - I used a modified version of your INNER JOIN query to restore 280,000 pagetext fields in my posts table that I'd accidentally overwritten. Saved me oodles of work, so very grateful ...

[Lats]

Thanks Lats - I used a modified version of your INNER JOIN query to restore 280,000 pagetext fields in my posts table that I'd accidentally overwritten. Saved me oodles of work, so very grateful ...

Great to hear. Do you mind sharing the modified version?

[Clickfinity]

Great to hear. Do you mind sharing the modified version?

Well I'd tried to replace my old domain name with the new one in the pagetext field but messed up the query. Instead of changing the domain name, I ended up writing the word pagetext into the pagetext field of 280,000 records. Nightmare!!!

I didn't know about inner joins before, but hoped there would be a way to copy-over the data from my backup tables and that's when I came across this thread and your query.

I played around with it a bit and this is the query I ended up using:

UPDATE
    post 
INNER JOIN
    post77
ON
    [COLOR=red]post.postid[/COLOR] = [COLOR=red]post77.postid[/COLOR]
SET
    post.pagetext = post77.pagetext
WHERE
    post.pagetext = [COLOR=red]'pagetext'[/COLOR];

Obviously you can replace "pagetext" in the WHERE part of the statement with whatever text you want to look for, but be aware that ' can break the query so always make sure you do a test on a single or small number of records first!!

Cheers,
Shaun

[Dan Druff]

Hi everyone. I know this thread is 6 years old, but some people still need this functionality.

I am running vBulletin 4.1.12, and I had the post edit history feature turned ON, but unfortunately there is no way to restore posts.

I worked on it today and came up with this SQL query, and it functioned perfectly:

UPDATE post
INNER JOIN postedithistory ON (post.postid = postedithistory.postid AND postedithistory.userid = XXXX AND postedithistory.original = 1)
SET post.pagetext = postedithistory.pagetext

Replace XXXX with the user ID of the poster whose edits you want to roll back.

This query rolls back ALL edits to the original post made by that user.

Some cautions:

1) BACK UP THE DATABASE FIRST, because if you do this wrong, you will ruin your forum

2) You need a version of vBulletin which supports edit history. You also needed post edit history turned ON (prior to the edits you want to reverse) in order for this to work.

3) I don't know how well this works with vBulletin 5, so again, make sure everything is backed up.