Deleting pages does't seem to work

Questions & Help
1

I’ve seen queries on this subject but they don’t seem to answer my exact question. I have a number of pages that I did not intend to make. That is annoying enough, but when I call up “All Pages” and check off the ones I want to delete, and even answer the question, “Do you really want to delete these pages”, nothing happens. I mean, when I call up “All Pages” again, there they all are.

I’m sure somebody has an answer to this question, so I’ll thank you in advance. Thanks!

3 Likes
2

I have the same problem, and find it really frustrating. One problem is that for many imports, like Twitter threads coming in from Readwise, people will number their tweets with #1, #2, #3 etc. So you end up with all those pages, with a billion unlinked references to them, cluttering up your graph.

I will call those unintentional pages “dumb pages”. Not because I’m angry at the moment at all. It’s just shorter than writing “pages that are unintentional, noise-generating, and without foreseeable utility”)

Once, in an effort to definitively delete some of these unintentional pages, I did the following:

  1. I went through to every page that showed up as a direct reference to the dumb one, and re-wrote what was showing up as a link (e.g. rewriting #3 as “Number three”).
  2. I went through every page with the numeral 3 in it, and replaced it with the word “three”.
  3. I clicked into the Page Properties block of all these pages to make sure the numeral “3” had not persisted as that property value.
  4. If the dumb page I was trying to delete was in a namespace, I made sure to delete or rename every page in the namespace that followed the one I was trying to delete, again, checking each page’s property title to make sure the name had really changed.
  5. Then I deleted the page from “All Pages” and Re-Indexed my graph immediately.
  6. Then I went to “Graph View” and hunted around to make sure the node was gone. I was super-careful to hunt visually, instead of search, to avoid inadvertently creating a new dumb page.

This removed the dumb page, but it all didn’t matter because on the next Readwise import, or maybe a cut/paste job from an online article, I ended up with another dumb #3 page again.

This is a real weakness for PKM tools that use the “#” character to create tags. I’d love it if there was a “review imports” feature that would hold off on tag creation, and allow us to substitute a string like “No.” or “Num.” or something…

Or like a sandbox status where we review an import, and something like the “Find on Page” fuctionality, that automatically highlights every instance of a string that could inadvertently become a tag, allowing us to put tick-marks around it before it goes ahead and creates dumb pages.

I know @KnowledgeSeq asked a similar question here: Does LogSeq automatically delete unreferenced tags/pages for you? I am confused about this especially if I drop the use of a tag/page?

@Bas_Grolleman proposes somewhat of a fix but it’s technical and I don’t really understand it (Automatically delete all links to a deleted page - #3 by Bas_Grolleman)

3

The technical bit was mostly a regex way of writing a find/replace. Personally I would prefer a harder split between the two, where links are easy and everywhere and tags need to be made before use but as a net result are easier to select. Then during imports either it’s an existing tag you can match up or a non existing match you can escape. ( \#hello doesn’t turn into a page for example )