Hi,
I’d like to let you know that over the last few weeks, for reasons I don’t understand, I’ve had several users simply disappearing.
It started around March 19th, and I’ve already had 5 of them telling me they can’t connect to the app. I’ve restored them with my backups, and at first I thought it was just a glitch.
Then I thought it had to do with the outage that occurred at the end of March. But now I have yet another one which vanished from the database. It was there on April 12th, and apparently on April 13th it has disappeared.
This is very disturbing. Users are worried that their data is not safe. And it’s not like the user was simply disabled, there is no trace of him left in the database.
The strange thing is my app does not implement complete deletion of a user. It’s a soft delete. So the users could not have caused this. And me neither, especially 5 times, inadvertently.
Do you know of anything that has been causing such issues ? Thanks.
Hi @Nicolas_REMY
Do you happen to know, if such users weren’t with the status “GUEST”?
Could you please provide you appId?
Regards,
Vlad
The user statuses were ENABLED.
The app id is D7075715-5086-625A-FFAB-39C2F40FB200.
Ok, I created a ticket to investigate the issue
could you please provide any additional information which could help us to research the problem, for instance objectId of a few recently deleted users
Regards,
Vlad
Hello @Nicolas_REMY
Thank you for the additional information. We will let you know as soon as we have the results of the investigation.
Regards,
Inna
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Hi @Nicolas_REMY,
the ticket is currently in progress. We will notify you when it will be fixed.
Hi,
I’m afraid another user has disappeared :
0F3270B5-C808-4682-9E18-8D62FC95F6BB
The last date when this user appears in my backups is on April 24th.
I would very much like to know what is going on.
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That is very concerning as I’m studying backendless for my future app. Got me thinking if it is worth it or if I should look to other services.
I don’t want to raise the alarm. There is always the possibility that I might be doing something wrong, so let’s not incriminate Backendless. But I do find it strange, because it has been working flawlessly for 18 months, and this has started happening over the last 2 months, without any major change on my app.
Database records cannot just disappear. If they are gone, they have been deleted. I am 100% certain the issue is in the app’s logic. If it were a problem in Backendless, it would not manifest itself in a single app.
We will check the access logs to find clues and share the findings with you.
Mark
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Just as an update, in fact it seems to have disappeared on April 13th. I hadn’t looked in the right place in my backups.
Oh, wow. Surprise. I also have a user disappeared.
My app ID 887E7D6D-1D36-DB89-FFD1-A238F5B46600
I have fake users imported from csv and I added my own profile manually right to the database through the console.
Yesterday I was working with it till my request limit hit.
Today I tried to login to my service with my account and it’s incorrect and my profile doesn’t exist in the database.
I don’t know objectId but I registered it under nikandrodev@gmail.com
Hi @Nik_AndroidDeveloper,
Investigation of your application logs showed that the user with the provided email was last mentioned during the execution of task on 2024-05-03 20:58:26,149.
Here is the user (some fields removed):
User { ___class: ‘Users’,
…
cityId: ‘11D740DE-4657-40E1-86F8-E4297D5812C8’,
ownerId: ‘07F70EC0-E5AA-4EC4-9D1E-D0D83BCE668A’,
…
objectId: ‘07F70EC0-E5AA-4EC4-9D1E-D0D83BCE668A’,
email: ‘nikandrodev@gmail.com’,
created: 1714575376469,
…
firstName: ‘Nikolai’,
… }
Further investigation revealed that on 05/04/2024 02:04:20, you yourself, from your device and your IP address, deleted 15 users,
among which was the aforementioned user with objectId: '07F70EC0-E5AA-4EC4-9D1E-D0D83BCE668A'.
Regards,
Viktor
Hi @Nicolas_REMY ,
According to the server data, all these users were deleted as guest users:
2024-03-19 20:28:41,921 - Guest user with id A05937FD-3C15-438A-B20F-68E9BC09BD68 deleted successfully
2024-03-07 08:11:02,400 - Guest user with id 8998CFF6-93D9-4AD7-B6E0-09D37EB28F45 deleted successfully.
2024-04-12 12:25:58,825 - Guest user with id 2964FE93-DF70-4256-8F24-F82BEC356B9B deleted successfully.
2024-04-13 20:13:58,676 - Guest user with id 0F3270B5-C808-4682-9E18-8D62FC95F6BB deleted successfully.
This was done according to this documentation: Guest Login API - Backendless REST API Documentation
Regards,
Viktor
Thanks for the reply @Viktor_Mudrevsky .
I just have a slight problem here : none of these actually were guest users… These are users who registered, have an email address, and have the Backendless status 1 in the database. That’s ENABLED, right ? That’s how they looked in the database before and that’s how they are in my backup files.
But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at a specific example, the last one in the list, 0F3270B5-C808-4682-9E18-8D62FC95F6BB. In the backup file provided by @sergey.kuk here, this user also has a bckls__userStatusId of 1. And that was on March 28th. That user got deleted on April 13th, allegedly because he was in guest status. And there’s no way to go back from ENABLED to GUEST. The same goes for user 2964FE93-DF70-4256-8F24-F82BEC356B9B, also with a bckls__userStatusId of 1 in the backup file you provided on March 28th, yet deleted on April 12th.
Forgive me, but I feel like I’m missing a piece of information to fully understand how that could have happened.
@Nicolas_REMY ,
I completely understand your point, and my response was just the information I could find to move a little further in understanding your issue; it certainly wasn’t a final solution.
I also remember last year’s story with your application, with user roles, and back then there was also confusion about who was a guest and who wasn’t. As far as I recall, the solution then was simply to manually change the user statuses in the database. Maybe now we’re seeing the consequences of those changes, or maybe not. I will continue to investigate your situation and discuss it with the team.
And yes, userStatusId = 1 indeed means ENABLED.
Regards,
Viktor
Thanks for your quick reply.
Indeed, when seeing your reply, I thought the same as you and I remembered that issue. I also wondered if there were some side effects. And that is quite painful right now because my earliest and most loyal users are being shot from my app !
It’s great if you continue to investigate. However, in the meantime, it would be great if you could :
- run a script on my whole users table to fully synchronize statuses so that no ENABLED user will be deleted in the future,
- and provide me with a list of users which got deleted, so that I can check if there are any important ones in there and restore them before they complain.
Finally, could you point me to the place where I can manage the maximum duration of a guest account ? I can’t seem to find it and I would like to lengthen the duration until the issue is solved.
Thanks for your help.
