Imported answers incorrectly reported

Ah, there was another one! Thanks for finding that.

This question was (somehow) imported twice, at these two URLs:

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277598
• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277725

Both questions were then deleted (by the System user), presumably as part of the import.

I saw the first one, because answers were not deleted and that gave me a navigation path. (I have an answer there, so it showed up on my profile.) I undeleted the question and then noticed that every answer was there twice, so I deleted the duplicates. I didn't notice that the reporting was wrong:

The first (undeleted) question in the screenshot actually has eight answers, two copies each of four answers. The second (deleted) question has no attached answers but reports having four.

I don't know the details about how import works, but I know that posts (meaning questions and answers) are individually imported and then knitted back together. An incoming answer has a parent ID for the question, but that's an ID on SE, so it needs to be rewritten to match up with the new question ID on Codidact. Apparently something went wrong in those associations, aside from the duplication. (If if were just a duplicate import we would expect to see two questions with four answers each, duplicates all the way down.)

There was at least one other question that came in with duplicate answers, which probably means it, too, has a stub question hiding behind a deletion. This will probably need to be repaired in the database; I'll escalate this to someone who has access to do that.

I'm digging through imported questions now to collect data and fix what needs fixing along the way (to the extent I can).

Unanswered questions that came in twice, one deleted and one not:

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277592 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277719

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277628 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277755

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277637 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277764

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277661 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277788

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277662 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277789

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277663 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277790

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277664 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277791

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277665 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277792

Answered questions that came in twice, each with answers intact, one question deleted and the other not, answers on the deleted question were not also deleted (I've fixed that now so confusing links won't show up on profiles):

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277631 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277758

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277640 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277767

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277579 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277706

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277659 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277786

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277651 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277778

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277643 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277770

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277647 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277774

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277590 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277717

Answered questions that came in twice, each with answers intact, one question deleted and the other not, and answers on the deleted question were deleted by the system:

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277667 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277794

Answered questions that came in twice, with the following results:

• visible question had two copies of each answer, i.e. all imported answers got connected to one of the questions (I deleted the duplicates)
• visible question reports zero answers on the question list, incorrectly
• deleted question has zero answers
• deleted question reports the original number of answers on the question list

These questions did that:

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277598 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277725 (the question that prompted this meta post)

• https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277621 and https://judaism.codidact.com/questions/277748

I think that's all of them. I don't know what commonalities questions in each group share, but... here's some data.

Lots of things went wrong in data import, it appears (and we'll want to understand them before doing this again), but I think there are only two extant questions that are incorrectly reporting their answer counts, so I hope that's something a developer can fix in the database.

If I've done this right, then there should be no more bad links on people's profiles -- meaning links to answers on deleted questions where the answers didn't get deleted like they should have. It should be the case now that the only navigation path to these posts is search (for people who can see deleted posts), and if you do that you'll see clearly in the search results that it's deleted.

posted over 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

4y ago

Monica Cellio‭ staff

2631 reputation 102 53 377 98