You must be an administrator to restore this site

[arinoch]

Quick summary

self-service site restores fail with error: "you must be an administrator to restore this site"

Steps to reproduce

1. Delete a site.
2. Then try to restore it from https://wordpress.com/sites

What you expected to happen

As a user, I should be able to restore a site.

What actually happened

We're getting reports that users are not able to, as in 8086469-zd-a8c.

Impact

Most (> 50%)

Available workarounds?

Yes, easy to implement

Platform (Simple and/or Atomic)

Simple

Logs or notes

Accessing the blog RC, there is no owner information on the deleted site. The system guesses who the owner is when the site is restored and an administrator is assigned. The HE must manually restore the site.

[github-actions]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• 8086469-zen
• 8106337-zen
• 8132488-zen
• 8145699-zen

[mrfoxtalbot]

Thank you for the report, @arinoch.

I am not sure if this would fall under "bug" or under "product decision". Should non-admin users be able to restore a site that has been deleted by an admin? Who should have the last word in this scenario?

I am going to relabel this as "Enhancement" for now but please feel free to comment if you have some insights or rationale you would like to share.

Thanks again!

[mrfoxtalbot]

One more thought, @arinoch. If an admin deletes a site, they will be removed. What happens then if an editor wants to reopen the site?

Should the old admin who deleted the site get re-added? Should the editor who restored the site be bumped to admin? I see this as problematic... I am going to actually close this as wontfix but please feel free to reopen if you want to continue exploring this.

Thanks again, James!

[ha-un]

Hi @mrfoxtalbot - to answer your question, an editor should not have permission to delete a site. Only admins and site owners.

Currently, both admins and site owners can delete a site, but only the original owner (site owner) can restore, and it should remain that way because we have to go through a series of steps if a non-site owner admin requests a site to be restored: PaIqia-6p-p2

The problem we're seeing is that sometimes, site owners cannot restore their site and they see a Only an administrator can restore a deleted site. error.

Example: 8106337-zd-a8c

Note: I'll keep this closed for now, but if there are more reports please re-open!

[arinoch]

Reopening this as we've got another report in 8132488-ZD

[philnick206]

I see this same issue in 8145699-zd-a8c

The issue is that the site they are trying to restore via /sites is showing as a Deleted Site, but it isn't. The user renamed the site (i.e. changed the subdomain address of the site), and this had the effect of deleting the site with the old name and creating a new one in the system, as well as showing the same thing to the user in /sites. If the user tried to restore this "deleted site", they receive the error that Only an administrator can restore a deleted site.

So it looks like, at least in my case, the renamed site should never be shown as one that can be restored in their list of sites under /sites. I'm not sure if this is the same bug or a separate bug, but I'll leave this here for additional investigation.

[arinoch]

@philnick206, that's a related but not the same bug. Previously sites were not renamed, but were deleted.

[ha-un]

This could be from the following change: p1715280145550409-slack-CB0B2G43X
Asked to confirm.

[mpkelly]

Hi, @arinoch and @philnick206. This is a temporary issue that affects some sites that were deleted 30 days before this change, p1715280145550409-slack-CB0B2G43X, on May 9th.

This could be from the following change: p1715280145550409-slack-CB0B2G43X
Asked to confirm.

Yes, that was it. Thanks!