Valid terms deleted by Term Sweep

I use the Meta Slider plugin.

A couple of weeks ago after installing WP-Sweep, it reported there were 100s of Unused Terms which was a % Of of over 80%. So clearly a candidate for cleaning.

The note in the Term Sweep section for Unused Terms says: “Note that some unused terms might belong to draft posts that have not been published yet. Only sweep this when you do not have any draft posts.”

There is no mention that a plugin could be affected by doing a Term Sweep.

I did not know this at the time but Meta Slider stores various items such as the slider IDs and associated links in the wp_terms, wp_term_relationships and wp_term_taxonomy tables.

These Meta Slider items are the terms that WP-Sweep reported as “Unused” and which could be deleted. Yet they were clearly not “Unused” – they were vital in allowing the sliders to work.

After doing a sweep, WP-Sweep has effectively deleted over 700 sliders on the website. Whilst some data for the sliders is intact, such as in wp_posts and wp_postmeta, without any of the wp_term… data, the sliders no longer display.

To say that I am upset at the damage your plugin has caused would be an understatement. I am now faced with having to recreate over 700 sliders.

It is wholly irresponsible to offer a plugin that caused such catastrophic harm to the website given the completely inadequate and incorrect warning that only posts might be affected by a Term Sweep.

PS. The sweep was carried out 2 weeks ago and there was a backup from the day before the sweep. The site however is a very busy news website that adds many new posts a day and the editor did not have cause to look at some old posts until a couple of days ago when it was then noticed that the sliders had disappeared. By this time the rolling cycle of daily database backups had overwritten the last database from before the sweep which contained the Meta Slider terms.