Loomio
Fri 6 Apr 2018 3:13PM

Deleted groups

MM Michael McKinsey Public Seen by 322

Hi all. I had a problem with deleting a group and losing the data. I hit the button "delete spam selected" when (I thought) I only had selected a group that I wanted to delete in the interface. What happened instead is all of the groups were deleted. I honestly cannot say if I had them all selected, it happened so quickly I was sure I had only selected the group I wanted to delete. Anyway, the group and server were new and the backup of the database was not being done yet, so we lost a few days of getting people to join and the first discussions (not sure yet how damaging this is going to be for the enthusiasm of using loomio, but stuff happens).

I do not see the info in the database, and I am not sure what that button does exactly. But on the outside chance there is some way to recover that group I thought I would ask. I have already set the group back up as a new group on the server and I am inviting people and apologizing for deleting the week worth of discussions, but I thought I would double check if someone more familiar with what that button does could let me know if that data may be in the database somewhere and could be reactivated. The users seemed to still be there, but the group data appears to be completely lost.

Of course I have the database backup taking place now (which I was working on at the time that I deleted the groups). Thanks for any info.

RG

Robert Guthrie Fri 6 Apr 2018 10:15PM

Sorry to hear you had this accident. It sounds like you may have accidentally clicked select all before you chose to delete. We use this function rarely, when we get attacked by spambots... the purpose of it is to completely remove the records from the database when there are thousands of them.

Maybe we want to change loomio-deploy to implement continuous archiving to enable rollback from these kinds of disasters.

MM

Michael McKinsey Sat 7 Apr 2018 12:27AM

Ya I guess that must have been what happened if that is safe to use when you have only the one you want deleted selected. That was what I thought I was doing. Unfortunate but nothing to be done now, looks like we may end up not being able to use Loomio in that organization because now everybody thinks it can't be trusted since I blew out the data so tide may have turned against using it. I have a solid backup plan running now, but it is beyond most peoples comprehension what happened and why it would not happen again. I will be more careful if/when there is a next time.

RG

Robert Guthrie Sat 7 Apr 2018 12:31AM

Very sorry to hear that. Maybe hosting the group on loomio.org will help give the group more confidence?

I don't mean to discourage you from hosting it yourself, but hopefully this is the kind of situation where we can add value over self-hosting the app.

MM

Michael McKinsey Sat 7 Apr 2018 12:49AM

We are a non profit with 400+ members without a giant budget, so the $1000 a year is a non starter I am afraid, I would have probably have trouble getting $100 a year out of them. We did have it set up for the 10 users to test it. Anyway at this point it is unlikely they are going to use it at all, and certainly not if it is going to cost $1000 a year to run it. I will see if I can convince them that it will not happen again, there was a group of people who did not like it anyway (I think they prefer the membership not have a place to express opinions etc, and this screw up probably gave them what they need to argue against using it). I was just lazy in getting the backup running, now I am sure we would not lose data again, but the worst already happened. We had just sent out an invitation to a large number of people and now they all have a broken link etc. so it just looks like it doesn't work and I had to send them a different link and all the people who were already in the first conversations lost their data etc so they lost enthusiasm. Just one of those things, bad timing.

M

Michael Tue 10 Apr 2018 9:42PM

Hi Michael, I'm sorry to hear of this experience, and it does sound irrecoverable... :cry:

However just wanted to clarify our pricing: We do invite people and groups who can't afford to pay a subscription to apply to our community sponsorship via this form (it's on our pricing page)

I'd also add that subscription pricing is our primary revenue stream that keeps Loomio alive and developing; we don't sell your data nor put advertising in the app :-)

Do let me know if you'd like to try again once the dust settles...

MM

Michael McKinsey Wed 11 Apr 2018 3:46PM

I certainly appreciate everything you do. I was part of the early support in that I donated at the level in the crowd funding campaign that was supposed to allow me to set up my own server. I appreciate that hosting with you would certainly be superior to hosting with a giant for profit corporation with nothing but exploiting it's users, however I am an administrator and I believe the hosting of projects like this should be available for the actual cost of the server hosting them. The only real failing in this experience was my not immediately setting up a backup plan, which now I have a daily backup going off site to three different data centers with email notifications if anything fails, so I do not think this will happen again.

I am still fighting the fight to get Loomio adopted in this particular organization, but even if it does not happen in this one, there will be many more and the server is set up now so I will be able to offer hosting of Loomio to those other organizations for what it costs to host it for me, which is very close to zero (so I will probably not charge them anything or only for my time which will not be much). I will support Loomio, and suggest that any organization that ends up making use of Loomio in a very productive and effective way donate and/or support the Loomio project in some meaningful way.

The forces opposing Loomio have decided to migrate the Yahoo group they were using (well hardly using, adoption inside the organization was almost zero) to groups.io - so I am sure you already knew this, but that at least in this one scenario is the competition you are dealing with and the features they think they need are free for enough users everyone in the organization can use the product. From a quick look, and I will argue that the fact that we have a full deployment without a dumbed down version for free while trying to get us to upgrade but instead a full featured product running on our own server will be one of the advantages of Loomio - but I do not think the products are the same thing and I don't see any reason not to use both.