Discussions Corrupted: Posts category indexing messed up after repo visibility change (Public -> Private -> Public)

[hongtaoh]

Discussion Type

Bug

Discussion Content

My repository's Discussions feature is corrupted after I changed its visibility from Public -> Private, and then back to Public.

My repository is: https://github.com/hongtaoh/hongtaoh.github.io

Here are the critical bugs:

1. Old discussions are hidden: All my old posts (from before the visibility change) have disappeared from the main Discussions page. The main page only shows new posts created after the repo was made public again.

2. Category Index is Broken (Critical): My old posts are NOT deleted. I can find them when I use the "View all discussions" filter. They are all correctly labeled as being in the "Announcements" category.
   However, if I click the "Announcements" category in the sidebar to filter, the page incorrectly shows "There are no matching discussions." This proves the category index is broken.

3. Settings Page is Broken: In the "Manage discussion categories" settings, all my categories ("Announcements", "General", etc.) are stuck in the "Categories without section" list.
   I have tried many times to create a "New section" and add these categories to it. Every time I click "Save changes" or "Create", the settings fail to save. The page just reverts back, and all categories remain "without section". I cannot fix the layout because the settings are broken.

I have already tried disabling and re-enabling the entire Discussions feature in the repository settings. This did not fix the problem.

My repository's Discussions database appears to be in a corrupted state. Please manually fix the index and category settings from your backend. Thank you.

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[tomthorogood]

Hi @hongtaoh,

Thank you for reporting this. We've received many reports about this lately, and we've been chasing down the source of the problem. Your report helped give us some critical details that we were previously missing, since I was able to directly observe the effects of repair attempts on your public repo's discussions listing.

I did manually re-build your index yesterday, but found this morning that it had once again become corrupted. This regression helped me get to the source of the trouble. I have a fix in the pipeline. We'll also be doing a full repair of our discussions index to repair the index for all customers, once the fix is deployed.

I'll comment again once the fix is deployed ❤️

[hongtaoh]

@tomthorogood Thank you so much for your work! I I am looking forward to you all having this bug fixed!

[tomthorogood]

Hi @hongtaoh just following up. Now that Universe has wrapped, I was able to deploy and verify the fix. (Although I had previously manually reindexed your issues again, and this time, at least, they didn't re-corrupt.)

You shouldn't have any more trouble here! Thanks again for your patience and for reporting the issue. If you need further assistance with this, please reach out to Support ❤️

[hongtaoh]

Hi @tomthorogood. Thank you so much for the amazing work! I was able to see all my previous discussion posts. Thank you so much again!!