Well 2020 is a very tough year and you might add ActiveRain problems to the list of things that we aren't happy about. I'm not sure if anyone has figured out what went wrong, but all the June posts went POOF and perhaps never to return. Though AR staff has commented that they found the lost data, it would appear that restoring the data has proven to be more of a technical challenge than would superficially seem.
One of the problems that I am aware of is that as people started creating new posts, the system started reassigning the same post IDs as the posts that went missing. Uh oh, Houston we have a problem! In order to restore the original posts, we now have two posts sharing a common post ID (that's not a good thing). I have no insider information, but I highly suspect that is a real problem for them.
Ok what do we do about this now? a) walk away from AR never to return or b) pick up the pieces, recover what you can and move on.
As far as point b) "recover what you can" I can suggest something that you may want to try.
Google has of course indexed the site and part of what it has in memory is what is called a "cached version" of the post. I recovered one of my blog posts from obscurity and have helped a few others. Let me show you what I did, just in case you also want to give it a try!*
*NOTE: Google will over time clear out this cache as it realizes the pages are no longer actually there. So I have only had about a 50% success rate of recovery for the posts of other people that I have tried this for.
The first thing is to do is a special kind of Google query, we are going to add some specifics to help find your post.
In Kathy's case I did:
site:activerain.com "Kathy Streib" "June*2020"
some quick notes about what that means:
site: means only look on the specified site (in this case activerain.com)
in quotes I put her name - the quotes tells google this is the one Kathy I'm looking nfor
in quotes "june*2020" and the * asterisk is called a wildcard and says show everything that is wrapped in text of June and 2020 (e.g. June 1, 2020 June 2, 2020, etc)
The next step is to get Google to show you the cached version of the post (since the actual post is no longer there!) In the snapshot below, notice that there is an arrowhead for a dropdown menu. From there you can tell Google you would like to see the "Cached" version (e.g. the copy of the post that it has saved)
Notice below that Google will offer you both a text-only version (all formatting and images stripped out) or the Source code which is in HTML. The source code would allow you to recover all your image references and your formatting as well. However it is not for the HTML squeamish. This requires a quick dive into the HTML which I'll guide you through if you are willing to go there.
I suggest that you copy all the HTML code from this window over to the text editor of your choice (e.g. notepad or notepad++ for windows, or TextEdit for mac)
By using the find command in your text editor, search for article-content.
The big block of text that you land on will be the main text of your post that you can copy and paste. Don't copy all the way to the end of the text file, but you will see a break point where the article content ends. Stop copying at that point.
Once you have the text on your clipboard. Head over to ActiveRain and start a new post. In the text editor, click the source code button (see below) and paste all the HTML that you had copied. Then click OK and you should see all the content of your post appear (formatting, images, and all!)
Once you get this far you can repost to share with the world again. Sorry, there's nothing I can do to get all your comments back again, but look for a whole new round of your AR pals checking in once again!
Remember, Google cache will have a limited time for it to find your posts. I'm sorry for your disappointment if you try all the above and discover it gone. However, I wanted to share this info for the cases where a few might get their content back.
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