Where have the empty DL categories gone?

[Richard H.]

I just noticed that the category numbering in the DL on istos was radically different from the numbering it was using last night, and wondered why.

I then noticed that the DL on istos isn't showing *any* empty DL categories (e.g. Information Services/Main Site) which have been part of the DL structure since we set it all up over a year ago.

I looked on arana and those categories have vanished. What's going on? We set up a basic structure in the DL and now any categories that had notihng inside them no longer exist!

This is potentially bad as various people have spent a lot of time setting up a structure and now some of that structure has gone. The only thing I can't say for definite is how long it has been missing from the arana DL as well. Was anything done to arana when the data.fs was copied?

[Sylvain Viollon (thefunny)]

Nothing have been done on the arana data.fs, we just copied it. Before (last night), the data.fs on istos was an old backup that david set, which is from before that category bug was detected, several month ago. So it's possible that during those months lot of categories have been deleted on arana (which would have triggered that large problem). I just check with the running arana, it's the same categories than on the newly migrated istos, nothing changed.

[Richard H. (richard-hewison)]

Nobody else can go in and systematically do that apart from the DL Managers (who can see the entire category structure) and there are only four of us with that role here.

It's not something that can be easily done either. It would actually take a long time to do that manually, and nobody would have any reason to do it. I will have to investigate further myself, but this is very worrying none-the-less.

[Kit Blake (kitblake)]

We don't understand what happened to the catagories. We haven't touched arana (or the software) for months. Last night we copied the Data.fs from arana, and whatever was there is now on istos. This has to be editor actions.

[Richard H. (richard-hewison)]

Unless our colleagues in Marketing went through and deleted all of the empty categories, this is not the result of an editor manually doing this as it would be a huge task to delete all of them!

It has to have been caused by something else (i.e. a bug soemwhere), regardless of when it happened. It's simply too big a task to have been done by someone and then forgotten about. I have no idea where to start but I will try and pinpoint (If I can) when this might have happened. Sadly the DL History option doesn't record the creation or removal of categories.

[Richard H. (richard-hewison)]

There is no consistency in regards to which categories have disappeared, as I have just found a few empty sub-categories that were created last Summer when the DL was installed, yet many others have vanished.

We can't even begin to guess at when this happened and what triggered it, but we really hope this doesn't happen again in the future.