Post Has Been Lost

• 

  abeaustin · Member · Apr 1, 2020 at 3:13 pm

  • Copy link
  • Add topic to favorites

  I had a post saved in my drafts that I intended to publish tomorrow. Today, when I looked through my drafts, though, it was nowhere to be found. It’s not that it is present but the content is empty, rather there is simply no record of the post at all.

  If I had accidentally deleted it then it should have been in the Trashed section of my posts, but I have nothing there. I have checked my Pages to see if it somehow got moved over to there. Nope.

  I have checked via the admin view of my site (https://givemepenandpaper.com/wp-admin). It is not there either.

  Could technical support find this lost content for me? If not I will be extremely disappointed.

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

• 

  abeaustin · Member · Apr 1, 2020 at 4:24 pm

  • Copy link

  So I found my missing post. I’ll share my process in the event that it might be useful to someone else.

  If you look at the url of your posts as you edit them, you will notice that they each end with some number. And if you look at a few of them, you will notice that those numbers aren’t random, they are ascending, though usually in leaps in bounds. I imagine these are internally stored as each post’s id.

  My theory was that if I could guess the right url, I might find my hidden post somewhere. So I opened a post that I knew had been completed BEFORE I wrote my post, made note of its id, and then began sequentially changing the url to one id number further.

  So first I tried
  https://wordpress.com/post/givemepenandpaper.com/3974
  then
  https://wordpress.com/post/givemepenandpaper.com/3975
  and then
  https://wordpress.com/post/givemepenandpaper.com/3976

  …

  Bear in mind, many of these will be an invalid page. Many of them will be the previous revisions of other posts. Eventually I found the ones for my missing post. It was there all along, just not showing up in any of the WordPress menus.

  I have a theory as to why my post went missing in the first place now, too. I never deleted it, but the very last change I did was accidentally change its title to be the exact same as another post I was working on. My assumption is that WordPress got confused about the two identical titles, and only showed me one of them.