by Cedar

When I left Hubski some time ago I deleted my entire comment and post history by hand; this was rude and childish and I would like to apologise for that; it removed content that others had enjoyed and the below script is my attempt to fix that.

This uses ruby and the mechanize gem to login to Hubski and iterate over the deleted page for your user account, credentials are stored in a config file and gems are setup through bundle. This script was for my own purposes and does not have any error handling, but I did include a 2 second delay between items in order to rate-limit it and reduce possible impact to the site as it worked through 940+ items.

Apologies if anybody has been notified from being tagged in the posts -- as these were restorations it was not something I anticipated happening and only now considered.

#Gemfile

  source 'https://rubygems.org'

  ruby '2.6.3'
  gem 'mechanize',  '2.7.5'
  gem 'yaml'

#config.yml

  hubski:
    username: ""
    password: ""

#hubski.rb

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  require 'mechanize'
  require 'yaml'
  
  config = YAML.load_file('config.yml')
  
  @agent = Mechanize.new
  @page = @agent.get('https://hubski.com')
  
  # Login to hubski with the saved credentials
  @page = @agent.click(@page.link_with(:text => 'login'))
  login_form = @page.forms.first
  login_form.u = config['hubski']['username']
  login_form.p = config['hubski']['password']
  @page = @agent.submit(login_form)
  
  puts "Logged in, proceeding to restore"
  
  #A reusable method to find and restore links, with 2 second delay for rate-limiting
  def undelete(page, counter)
    page.links_with(:text => 'undelete').each do |link|
      current_page = @agent.get(link.resolved_uri)
      confirmation_form = current_page.forms.first
      result = confirmation_form.submit(confirmation_form.button_with(:value => 'No'))  
      counter += 1
      sleep 2
    end
    counter
  end
  
  restore_count = 0
  restore_count_total = 0
  
  # Repeatedly check the deleted items list and restore 
  loop do
    @page = @agent.get('https://hubski.com/deleted')
  
    # Restore any comments on the page
    restore_count = undelete(@page, restore_count)
  
    # Restore any posts on the page
    @page.links_with(:xpath => "//span[@class='feedcombub']/a").each do |link|
      post_page = @agent.get(link.resolved_uri)
      restore_count = undelete(post_page, restore_count)
    end
  
    puts "Restored #{restore_count} posts and comments"
    restore_count_total += restore_count
  break if restore_count == 0
    restore_count = 0
  end
  
  puts "Restored #{restore_count_total} total posts and comments, exiting..."