[Forum] Help needed ASAP - User edited his posts

[Blade-uk]

Hi guys,

A user on my forum had some very good posts but also a lot of spam posts too, so i banned him for 7 days to teach him a lesson but now he has come back and edited all of his decent posts.

How can i restore his posts?

Database backup im guessing?

Andy

[waynem]

Do you have "Post Edit History" turned on in the Message Posting and Editing Options turned on? I'm not sure how you recover the old posts, but the text seems to indicate you can:

Enable this option to log the previous versions of posts when they are edited.

[steven s]

Do you have "Post Edit History" turned on in the Message Posting and Editing Options turned on? I'm not sure how you recover the old posts, but the text seems to indicate you can:

Is that something new in vB4? I never noticed it.

[Blade-uk]

Yeah i have that enabled and i see you have to click on the "edited by blah" bit but is there a button to restore or do i have to copy and paste in the original?

Andy

[ENF]

You'll have to cut and paste the original material. All you can do is compare versions of the post with the 'Post Edit History' area.

A small suggestion: We disable editing of posts after certain time period has passed to prevent things like this. Most people don't know that we track the post edit history, but anyway...

[Blade-uk]

Thanks ENF, i will look into it

Andy

[waynem]

Just went through this to see how it worked, and I think a nice option for vB to put into place in the future would be a restore previous version button.

Time Limit on Editing of Posts

is in the same screen I mentioned earlier.

[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.

[Bryanb]

You could also just have all copies of posts sent to your email address. You can enter an email address in the Forum Manager "Email Addresses to Notify When there is a New Post ". This way you have a copy of all original forum posts on your harddrive. I've been doing this for years.