Risk of wiping all pages by mistake, suggesting a change

Hey there,

Pods does not wipe pages or any content normally. There is only one case where this can happen and that’s if the admin chooses to delete all content for a Pod and it has a warning for that.

Have you reported this issue before or do you have any other details? Thanks for the review here but this would have definitely been better as a support topic first so we can help you figure out what plugin may have caused your issue here.

There is only one case where this can happen and that’s if the admin chooses to delete all content for a Pod and it has a warning for that.

Bad design. One would expect to delete the Pods, not the entire pages. The warning may be read negligently as “are you sure you want to delete all Pods?”, not “all pages”. Why is that even an option?

You are right, that would be bad design if that were how you described. However, the interface in this area is very clear about the options you can choose per pod: https://share.skc.dev/QwuLby9K

* Delete All Items
* Delete

Based on what you described, you likely chose to Delete All Items without realizing that it would delete all of the items. That’s okay, that happens from time to time when we are in a fast paced job.

I’m thinking about adding an interstitial modal that shows up when using those Delete actions so that it can outline with graphics what will happen in each case so it would be more difficult to moss those details. Right now it’s just a standard confirmation dialog in the modal.

Were you able to restore your data from your daily/hourly backups or does your host not offer that?

Thank you for the kind replies despite the one star. The one star and the review was to warn other users about this problem (it was pretty bad to see all my pages deleted), but I’m changing it since I see you seem to want to work into this problem.

However, the interface in this area is very clear

No, it is not, because it says “items”, which is too generic, one would think about the pods or the fields of that particular pod, not the pages. Especially because the hover description (“alt”) of the other option (“Delete”) says “Delete this item”, so, for consisency, it is obviously assumed that by “items” one means “pods”/pod’s fields, not actual posts/pages.

I’m thinking about adding an interstitial modal that shows up when…

That’s good but I strongly suggest renaming it to “Delete all related PAGES/POSTS” or something like that (assuming you even want to keep that option, because imho it’s just dangerous and unnecessary to have).

By the way, right now the hover description (“alt”) says “Delete All Items this item” (sic), which is probably a typo and maybe it’s missing a “for”.

Were you able to restore your data from your daily/hourly backups or does your host not offer that?

Yes, I wrote in the first post “luckily I had a backup”, I always have backup for everything in general, both on my PC and online.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by reviewingstuff.

LOL, trying to delete a pod:

Database Error; SQL: DELETE FROMdb_podsrelWHERE (pod_id= 0 ANDitem_id= 1190 ) OR (related_pod_id= 0 ANDrelated_item_id= 1190 ); Response: Table ‘my_table.db_podsrel’ doesn’t exist

(i didn’t touch the database ever)
I give up with this plugin and I don’t have time right now to offer more info and investigate more, I’m just using an alternative plugin.
I still recommend everything in my previous post, so at least no other users will delete their pages.

There’s a tool in Pods Admin > Settings > Cleanup and Reset, you’ll find the “Recreate missing tables” tool there at the bottom.

This can help when you have restored a DB that did not contain the table that Pods sets up on initial plugin activation.

We’ve done our best to think of these things to make it easier to handle just about every case where something could go wrong.

By the way, our team is moving forward with a replacement flow for our Delete All Items action so as to make everything more clear and hopefully avoid admins making that mistake in the future.

We can always offer up support in the normal area of the support forums for the plugin. I hope in the future you will consider posting there to work through any concerns on plugins that you deal with going forward.

Thanks for providing more details and feedback on your experience, we are always trying to improve flows and this is an area we have had our eye on for an improvement — so it’s going to be moved up the priority list as a result of your challenges here.

@sc0ttkclark – just have to say you handle criticism like a champ. Excellent work as always. Pods just keeps getting better and better.