This is a report of an unexpected buggy behaviour we have experienced at moodle.org today.

• tsala was asked to move the MoodleNet forum between courses, which she did on Friday 10 January around 2pm (you might recall this as it caused a lot of unexpected notifications being sent because the forum was restored with the auto-description mode enabled).
• Today on Monday 13 January, Helen noticed there is a weird forum post https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=395676#p1595264 with no content.
• Problem 1: How that there is a forum post with no content if the message is a required field?
• Problem 2: That forum post has been authored by the user who has not logged in to moodle.org for more than 9 years

From the database, I can confirm that forum post is really empty (no invisible content):

mysql> SELECT * FROM forum_posts WHERE id = 1595264\G

*************************** 1. row ***************************

            id: 1595264

    discussion: 395676

        parent: 1595235

        userid: 1223156

       created: 1578876043

      modified: 1578876043

        mailed: 1

       subject: Re: Introductions

       message: 

 messageformat: 2

  messagetrust: 0

    attachment: 

    totalscore: 0

       mailnow: 0

privatereplyto: 0

     wordcount: NULL

     charcount: NULL

       deleted: 0

1 row in set (0.00 sec)

From the user's activity log, I can see the posting event comes with the Origin set to "cli" which suggests it was triggered by a cron job or something like that. But the Site administration > Server > Tasks > Task logs does not show any tasks executed around that time.