Comments on older imported posts have vanished

  • Unknown's avatar
    puzzlement · Member ·

    I imported our site about 48 hours ago from a self-hosted WP.org install.

    Comments on many old posts, such as http://hoydenabouttown.com/2011/09/01/thursday-cheezburger-sprin/#conmments have entirely vanished.

    They were badly formatted on import, because I’d passed the WXR file through an intermediate Python script in order to update some URLs and it didn’t write out CDATA blocks in the output WXR, but I had intended to repair them. However, they’re now not visible at all to me. Where have they gone and can they be put back?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

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  • Unknown's avatar
    alexjgustafson · Member ·

    Looks like your import contained over 56,000 comments. When editing the post you linked to I see 3 comments are present:

    https://hoydenabouttown.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=10467&action=edit

    However they were not being displayed on the page. I ‘unapproved’ then ‘approved’ one of the comments and then found they all appeared. Since you know there were issues with the import, I can only assume it was that formatting that played a part.

    If you still have access to that WXR file, you might have better look removing all your comments — re-exporting the comments from a local WP.org install, then re-import the comments. Your current blogs moderation settings may have also impacted them? Since the comments were closed on the post, adding the new comments again during import probably left them marked as “unapproved” — since the blog thought comments were closed.

    The important thing is it appears no data was lost.

  • Unknown's avatar
    puzzlement · Member ·

    Thanks for that info alexjgustafson, it let me figure out what to do.

    Since the comments needed to be fixed in a predictable way (they needed to be de-HTML-escaped so that, eg, links aren’t rendered visibly as <a href= etc) and you worked out that re-approving a comment per post would cause all comments to be visible, I am running a script against the API that does both those things. It looks to be working well and is causing comments to be visible again.

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