# Askbot Project Documentation

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# Askbot management commands

There are a number of command line utilities help the forum administrator perform a range of tasks such as add or revoke administration privileges, back up and restore the forum data, fix database errors if such occur, etc.

To run these commands there is a general pattern:

    cd project_directory
    python manage.py some_command [possible arguments and parameters]

I.e. the commands are generally run from the project directory (the same one that contains your settings.py file) and they may use additional parameters and options.

## Data and User administration commands

The bulk of the management commands fall into this group and will probably be the most frequently used.

command | purpose
--- | ---
add_admin <user_id> | Turn user into an administrator <user_id> is a numeric user id of the account
remove_admin <user_id> | Remove admin status from a user account - the opposite of the add_admin command
add_askbot_user –user-name –email [–password] | Create a user account. If password is not given, an unusable password will be set. The command does not create associations with any of the external login providers.
merge_users <from_id> <to_id> | Merges user accounts and all related data from one user to another, the “from user” account is deleted.
dump_forum [–dump-name some_name] | Save forum contents into a file. –dump-name parameter is optional
get_tag_stats [-u|-t] [-e] | Print tag subscription statistics, per tag (option -t) or per user (option -u), if option -e is given, empty records will be shown too (longer versions of the options are: –per-tag-subscription-counts for -t, –per-user-tag-subscription-counts for -u, and –print-empty for -e).
load_forum <file_name> | Load forum data from a file saved by the dump_forum command
load_stackexchange <file.zip> | Load SackExchange dump into Askbot. It is best to run this command on empty database. Also - before running, make sure that askbot.importers.stackexchange is in the list of installed apps within your settings.py file (it might also be necessary to run syncdb command to initiate the SE importer tables).
rename_tags –from <from_tags> –to <to_tags> –user-id <user_id> | Rename, merge or split tags. User ID is the id of the user who will be assigned as the performer of the retag action. If more than is in the –from or the –to parameters then that parameter quoted, e.g. `–to “tag1 tag2”. If user id is not given, the administrator with the smallest id number will be automatically assigned.
rename_tags_id –from <from_tag_ids> –to <to_tag_ids> –user_id <user_id> | This command is the same as rename_tags, but takes the tag id’s as arguments.
delete_unused_tags | Permanently deletes tags that do not appear in any questions , including the questions that are themselves marked as deleted.
update_avatar_data | Set values of avatar types for all users; this command may take up to 2s per user, because it makes up to one http request per user to gravatar.com. This data is used to display preferentially real faces on the main page.
build_thread_summary_cache | Rebuilds cache for the question summary snippet.
delete_contextless_... | delete_contextless_badge_award_activities Deletes Activity objects of type badge award where the related context object is lost.
delete_contextless_activities | Same as above, but works in a broader sense - when the related context object does not exist, but the generic foreign key to that object is still present.

## Email-related commands

These commands deal with the periodic tasks related to sending and receiving email by askbot. A UNIX program called cron can run these commands at the specified times (please look up futher information about cron elsewhere).

Any configurable options, related to these commands are accessible via “Email” section of the live settings.

command | purpose
--- | ---
send_email_alerts | Dispatches email alerts to the users according to their subscription settings. This command does not send instant” alerts because those are sent automatically and do not require a separate command. The most frequent alert setting that can be served by this command is “daily”, therefore running send_email_alerts more than twice a day is not necessary.
post_emailed_questions | (experimental feature) posts questions sent by email to enable this feature - please follow the instructions on sending email to askbot. This command uses live settings “allow posting by email” and “replace spaces in tags with dash”.
send_unanswered_question_reminders | Sends periodic reminders about unanswered questions. This command may be disabled from the “email” section of live settings, as well as an initial wait period and the recurrence delay may be set.
send_accept_answer_reminders | Sends periodic reminders about accepting best answers. This command may be disabled from the “email” section of the live settings, as well as the appropriate delay parameters may be set.

## Data repair commands

Under certain circumstances (especially when using MySQL database with MyISAM storage engine or when venturing to adapt the software to your needs) some records in the database tables may become internally inconsistent. The commands from this section will help fix those issues.

Note

Data inconsistency in the Askbot project is considered as a critical error and as a matter of the project policy is addressed on the day of reporting. If you discover such issue - please report it at the forum or by email at admin@askbot.org

command | purpose
--- | ---
add_missing_subscriptions | adds default values of email subscription settings to users that lack them
fix_answer_counts | recalculates answer counts for all questions
fix_inbox_counts | recalculates response counts in the user inboxes
fix_revisionless_posts | adds a revision record to posts that lack them
fix_question_tags | takes tag names from the record on the question table and stores them in the tag table. This defect may show when the server process is interrupted after the question was saved, but tags were not updated, and the symptom is that the question cannot be found via the tag search.

The above commands are safe to run at any time, also they do not require additional parameters. In the future all these will be replaced with just one simple command.

## Developer commands

Besides the commands designed to help run the forum, there are several aiming to help the developers of the Askbot project: