I had a bit of a shock today, when checking web stats. Having drilled into data, it appeared that people were viewing old content that to my mind, no longer existed. The culprit seems to be the stacks plugin, but I may be incorrect.
I cannot seem to rid the site of a few pictures that may have been carried over, I am guessing, when I repurposed Partials. They add significant size to a now slim site.
Any idea how to permanently delete this stuff? Its not in Resources and I have tried re-creating the partials, even removing it from the .RW8 files, but it will not go!!
I’ve spent a few hours digging, refreshing, replacing and more. Some answers:
If you have uploaded a gallery, used local images and then replaced them, by dragging, without deleting the original, it will be stuck in your website forever. Similarly (using Source), if you have used dragged images in a container background and again replaced them with online or linked images by using the pulldown for linked or warehoused images, but not physically deleted the originals, they will also be stuck in your site forever.
I am sure that I will continue to find more images, forever trapped in similar ways, but having lost over 100Mb of content from diligent cleansing, it is worth being sure that images or other unwanted content are deleted, not simply replaced.
None of this is “weird” or “unexpected” behavior. RW and Stacks have always just published new material. They’ve never deleted “stuff”. Thus it’s always been the case that individuals need to delete unwanted items themselves. (This includes old pages they are no longer using, as well as images, PDFs, and other materials.)
Typically the easiest way to do this is to delete your RW site content (all folders, files, etc.) in one go and then do a complete republish. That’s the easiest way but someone also needs to remember NOT to delete content that was not originally published by RW. For example, I use MachForm and so I need to not delete it. Usually this is all very easiy/quick work, but if someone is kind of “loose” on details it is possible they run into problems.
Putting it all differently, having a good reliable FTP app has always been a good tool to have. cPanel can do the same, but it’s much more laborious.
I do agree with you Matthew and have always deleted pages etc with Transmit, my fave FTP app. It is the random images that I found that threw me and the fact they are buried in galleries and containers. The regular clearance of resources and site delete and republish does not remove these, as they get republished every time.
Following up from this, any idea how some of these weird (and non-existent) URLs occur?
There were /projects/car-photography-project/ on the site many years ago, but the whole thing was full deleted long ago and there was never a linkage with separate site wild photo and all the other strings #puzzled
Hmm … okay, that is truly weird. I’ve never experienced that myself but … when I do galleries I’m always directly pointing to a specific folder already on my server space … so I’m not adding images to RW resources. That may be why I haven’t run into a similar problem. I’m afraid I can’t help out with this situation. It might be due to how a specific gallery stack works, or perhaps some bug or anomoly in how RW resources works.
Someone else might be able to help you more if you let us know what specific gallery stack you are using.
Thanks Matthew, yes, some truly weird stuff going on. I use to add images to stacks, but long, long ago. Source completely changed everything for me two or three years back and 99.9% of images and MP3 files (sound recordings) are stored on the server
The URL is not showing correctly, so in case anyone else has thoughts, here they are in their full, bizarre, glory
Some of those folders: /test/ for example have not been on the server for many years and the /projects / folder for at least two years. Is it possible the site is cached somewhere? Even then, none of the bizarre URLs ever existed.
