Bad News: MFP says they can't restore the old group.

orlcam

MyFitnessPal has informed me that the group was deleted by the owner and that they can not "at this time" restore the group.

MissMaggie3, the owner of the original group told me she didn't delete it and passed ownership to 2 other users (I didn't know you could do that) several months ago.

So now you know what I know.

Here's a copy of the letter I received from MFP:

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Michelle wrote:
OCT 16, 2014 | 02:34PM PDT
Hi,

Thanks so much for following up and providing additional information. We've looked into this for you and it looks like the group was actually deleted by the owner. I'm sorry for any inconvenience! Unfortunately at this time we do not have a way to restore a group once it has been deleted.

If you know of any similar groups, or are interested in starting a new group in place of this one, please let us know so we can pass that information along to any other former members of the 5:2 Fasting group who would like to try and reconnect.

Thank you so much for your patience. Please don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything else at all we can help you with.

All the best,
Michelle
MyFitnessPal Community Staff

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If they would allow me to access their SQL server(s) then I would write a routine to export the old messages/threads and import them into this group...but that's just me dreamin'.

So, I'm open to whatever. Just let me know what else I can do.

In the meantime I'm going to start pulling some of the old recipe posts off of Google cache and adding them to the 2 threads Foamroller setup.

All of that knowledge and experience flushed...seems so odd to me that MFP didn't have a script already written to fix this exact problem. On a massive data migration like this? Nah, I don't believe it.

jknight001

Don't believe it either. Must be that it is either it is too time consuming for them to retrieve the data or they are not backing it up. Seems negligent to let anyone permanently delete a group, especially since there are those out there with 7K+ members.
This group is going well. Perhaps you can start a "Introduce Yourself" thread and pin it as well as your spreadsheet and the rest will take care of itself.

orlcam

From what I can tell you can no longer "pin" a thread. You can set a thread to "Announce", but it will only stick it at the top of the actual group page...if you bookmark the "all discussions" page like I do then the announcements will not show at the top.

If I am wrong then please someone correct me.

The spreadsheet is Foamroller's...I think she is putting together a "newbie" thread.

orlcam

bump...

I went through the old recipe thread and think I got everything...I combined some posts, fixed a few errors I just happened to see, and formatted it as best I could. I apologize beforehand if I missed anything.

jknight001

How did you get the recipe thread????

I realized later I meant your BMR, TDEE, and BMI Calculator. Just was one of those days where I wasn't sure where my brain was.

orlcam

jknight001 wrote: »

How did you get the recipe thread????

I realized later I meant your BMR, TDEE, and BMI Calculator. Just was one of those days where I wasn't sure where my brain was.

Sorry, I knew what you meant...I just didn't want to take credit for Foamroller's contribution.

I poked around on google at first (you can click some of the pulldowns on your search results...then click "cached") but I found the most complete content using this site:
cachedpages.com/

You can do your initial search on google to get the old url, then paste it into the page above and select "Coral Cache". Unlike google they redirect additional links back to themselves so you can actually browse the whole cache without knowing the url's of secondary pages (like page 2, 3, 4, etc. of a thread). Very helpful, but I have no idea what the expiry date is on this stuff...so if you have something you want to bring back you should probably do it soon.

flumi_f

Sounds like a brush off to me! They just messed up, IMO!

jknight001

@orlcam - Oh, yeah cached web pages. You are a computer whiz.

Perhaps you should send your solution to MFP? JK.

I have to say I really miss the tickers. It was great to easily see not only my progress but others as well. Very encouraging. I plan to send MFP a note about it today.

orlcam

OK, I'm not going to pursue this any further...based on the latest correspondence from MFP I'm choosing to believe that I was lied to by the original owner. If something else comes to light I may change my mind. Here's the latest volley:

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"I" wrote:
OCT 16, 2014 | 04:16PM PDT
I realize there is supposedly nothing that can be done but I want to inform you that the owner (MissMaggie3) is telling us that she did not delete the group. I’m in a bit of a quandary here... we've started a new group and I told everyone I would let them know the response. Is MissMaggie3 lying to me(us)?

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Michelle wrote:
OCT 17, 2014 | 11:24AM PDT
I apologize for all the confusion and for any inconvenience. The creator of the group asked us to delete the group, and we did. Unfortunately, there isn't a way for us to get the group or the content from the group back, but i'm very happy to hear that you were able to start a new group and invite everyone back.

If you'd like to share the group with us, I'd be happy to send anyone else that way who inquires about the original group.

Thanks so much for your patience,
Michelle
MyFitnessPal Community Staff

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"I" wrote:
OCT 17, 2014 | 1:30PM PDT

The new group is called “5:2 Fasting” and the url is:
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/100058-5-2-fasting

Just out of curiosity...what happens if an owner of a group with thousands of members chooses to delete it, does it just fall into oblivion? I am new to MyFitnessPal, but there are members of that group that have been faithful users of your site for many years. Their whole body of experiences and knowledge is gone; their written history with you is just...poof! I've been doing IT consulting for over 20 years now and it is hard for me to imagine that your old database is gone and that no script was written before the migration to handle a possible group/thread corruption. A simple export (from the old database) and import (to the new database) is all that’s needed; I expect that many (or all) of the C.R.U.D. routines already reside in your arsenal.

I think it may just boil down to the fact that we are small in number, so it wouldn't be “too great” of a loss if we took offense and moved on. Please forgive me for the frank nature of this reply, but the situation has been frustrating to say the least. You should be commended for many of your current improvements as well as your progressive eye to the future, but with the good so comes the bad and it would be negligent of me to not point out what I see as a procedural oversight. At the very least this can/should be taken into consideration when planning subsequent fail-safes.

Thank you for your time,
@orlcam

jknight001

Great final response! Gracious yet honest. Thank you for going to bat for all of us.

Did MFP ever give a name or date of when the group was deleted. Michelle keeps referring to the owner. If MissMaggie3 passed the ownership over could have it been the new owners, if even by accident? Clearly the group was alive and well until last week. Or maybe this is all a moot point? Doesn't matter who did what. The point is MFP can't recover the data.

Don't know if you noticed but if you browse the groups, the last pages of the group listings (close to 1000 pages) has a ton of group names that start with DELETED and they contain no members. This was shortly after the changes on the MFP website so I took it that someone at MFP was doing a clean up of groups in addition to the changes. I did look to see if 5:2 was among them but there was so many and there was no way to search for the name (that I could see) so I stopped.

BTW, my memory was that there was 1K+ in this group??? Fortunately, since the name of this group is the same others will find it. Hopefully they will look and not just think they were dumped.

orlcam

Thanks, although all was for naught.

MFP did not say when it was deleted...I checked in Friday night (Oct 10) and it was there; Saturday morning at about 6 am my time (GMT -6, US Central) it wasn't. The update happened days before this, so the timing of it always seemed odd to me. I am unaware of the ability to pass ownership of a group to someone else (unless it is done manually by MFP). You can make another member a moderator (or leader), but according to MFP's helpdesk, which reads "Any Group Owner can delete a group by clicking the “gear” icon on the Group’s main page, or in a list of Groups.", only an owner (or MFP representative?) can delete a group.

Also I think Michelle was very careful with her wording; this was the second time I alluded to MissMaggie3 as the owner, so I feel MFP did not want to specifically name anyone (and they didn't). Michelle stated "The creator of the group asked us to delete the group, and we did." Now this could mean I'm completely off base and that MissMaggie3 is not the "creator", but when I first contacted MissMagie3 and told her "...I'm a user of a group (5:2 fasting) you created a while back..." she did not correct me. So, while I'm generally annoyed by all of it (especially that someone may have intentionally wasted my time), I need to deal with it (forget about it) and move on. I may have already ruffled my allotment of feathers on MFP and I would be annoyed even further if I was disconnected from you good people.

I tried to find the original "5:2" by walking through roughly 25 pages of groups, but quickly realized that without the ability to do a search it would take more time than I was willing to spend. If the group still existed with the original id number and tag then my old bookmarks should still have been active...and they weren't.

1000+ users? Wow...that makes it much worse than I initially thought.

Tiamo719

Wow, that's poor moderation/ownership if you ask me. There is no reason to delete anything unless you are verbally assaulting someone and in that case, the assaulter should be banned.

I wonder what the reasoning behind it was.