Plugin destroyed my blog

Wordpress Plugin
1

I set up the plugin on my blog - it started importing blog posts and proceeded to basically wipe out all my blog posts. The posts it matched with kept the title of the post, but then wiped everything out inside the post itself. Over a decade of work on my blog is gone.

I’m going to try to restore from a backup, but there needed to be some warning that this could happen, or some sort of preview option.

2

I managed to stop the import and have begun damage control.

I’m not at home right now, so I can’t go over the recommended plugin settings, but a few recommended changes:

  1. Patreon posts should be imported as Drafts. It’s more work on my end to do the posts, but it avoids removal of existing posts, and if the body text doesn’t import, that’s saved. Also, that avoids flooding my social media accounts.

  2. Imports should come with the Patreon post date.

  3. The imports appear to have deleted the posts on my Patreon - don’t do that.

3

The imports appear to have deleted the posts on my Patreon - don’t do that.

Hi! The WordPress plugin does not have access to delete any posts from patreon.com (there are no public APIs to delete posts).

I’m curious to understand more what happened. You had posts on your WordPress blog and you also had posts on patreon.com. The plugin was attempting to sync posts from Patreon → WordPress and somehow deleted the existing posts that you already had, is that correct? Did the full posts get deleted or only partial content? Trying to learn more about the behavior, thanks for sharing!

4

So, what happened is new posts started showing up on the Blog from the Patreon - these were clearly marked with current post dates even though the original posts were from about 10+ years ago.

The blog posts for these had no body text, and had the default category and tag information from the Patreon. Where those posts has an identical title to an existing post, the old post would be removed, and the new one, with a current post date, would take its place.

When I checked for those posts on the Patreon, for posts where they replaced the original post, the Patreon version could not be found.

For some of those, I was able to rebuild them from crossposts elsewhere (on Letterboxd, or YouTube), but for others there was nothing to work off of.