Activity log
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I have recently been appointed as an admin on a wordpress.com site. One of the contributors says his 60 posts were trashed on 20th December, 2020. He republished them later but he thinks whether the site was hacked or the previous admin had deleted them.
Because it is a free site I only have access to the last 20 activities. The admin prior to me is unavailable. Is it possible to obtain activity log for just for this day? -
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Hi there,
I can tell you the site was not hacked, because WordPress.com sites cannot be “hacked” in the traditional sense. It’s possible someone may have gotten access to the account of a specific user on the site, but we’d need to be contacted by the specific user who suspects their account was compromised to look into it in that case.
We cannot provide you with specific information from our internal logs, so I cannot tell you who deleted those posts. But I can tell you that aside from the post author themselves, only a user with the Admin or Editor role can delete posts made by another user.
So if the post author is sure they didn’t do it, and you’re sure it wasn’t you or the other admin (currently the site has two admins) who did it, then it’s a safe assumption that a former admin did this.
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Thank you for helping me narrow down the problem!
It would have been great to receive the activity log but I understand the company policy does not allow it. At least, I’m relieved that the site is not hacked.
I did not know about the second admin. I’ll talk to her.Thank you again!
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Hi Kokkieh and Sandeept,
I am the user @dancinglightofgrace who enquired about the deletion of about 60 posts on blogging101alumni.wordpress.com
I didn’t do that myself.
Though it’s irrelevant:
I had an id @thinkerv0 when the forum was created and I came up with the idea for the forum. I was the most prolific contributer then. I joined the forum again on October 16, 2020.
Regards,
Dancinglightofgrace -
Hi again,
One former admin suggested they didn’t do it. Now we don’t know who did it. I feel it’s my right to know how that happened else it might continue to happen. Kindly let me know who or what trashed those 60 posts on December 20-21 2020.
Sincerely,
Dancinglightofgrace -
I’m afraid that is not possible. To provide you with any information from our internal logs would require a court order:
And the simple fact is that an admin can do what they want on a site. This is why we don’t recommend that any site has more than one admin, and if you add a second admin to a site, you should know that you’re giving them full access, including the ability to completely delete the site.
So the best course of action to prevent this happening again, is for the site owner to make sure all users on the site only have the minimum permissions they need for what they must be able to do on the site.
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Hell Happiness Engineers,
I discovered some strange facts about our Activity Log. I don’t know if these are bugs or limitations due to the site being free, but I feel I should let you know so that improvements can be made.
1. Activity Log on desktop and Dashboard is quite limited. Jetpack specifically limits it to 20 recent views. However, there is access to almost a month of activity on the Android app. I wish more activities were available on the desktop as well.
2. On January 10, I had deleted two untitled drafts. However, the Activity Log shows it as deletion of ‘Posts’. It should have been ‘Drafts’.
3. Some activities are absent. For instance @dancinglightofgrace had published a blog titled ‘Drafts’. The Activity Log shows when comments were posted but it does not show when the blog was published.
Thank you.
Sandeept
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Hi there,
The Activity log is limited for sites on the Free plan. You can read more here:
- The topic ‘Activity log’ is closed to new replies.
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