The old forum

[anandhanju]

Thank you, 7im, for dispelling any doubts of loss of forum data with your constant offers of looking up one's last post/post count etc.

For those who still aren't convinced,

...FOR THE LAST TIME, THE DATA IN THE OLD FORUM IS NOT LOST!!!...

There. That ought to clear things up.

Anyway, the point of my post. Thanks to the Wayback Machine (http://web.archive.org), you can view a slightly older snapshot (as of July 04, 2007) of the old forum.

Without further ado, the link: Old forum (Jul 04, 2007)

The entire series of snapshots: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://for ... munity.org

Hope this helps,
Anand

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Fold on!

[smoking2000]

Just strip the "forum." part of the old forum URL and you'll get to the old forum.
I did this for all broken links on the FAH Wiki last night.

Both forum.folding-community.org and folding-community.org point to the same webserver IP address in DNS, only the webserver has been configured to send a HTTP redirect header (Location:) to foldingforum.org if you're requesting the website forum.folding-community.org. So if you want the old forum content, surf to folding-community.org without the "forum." prefix.

But beware, the old FCF still throws PHP errors and warnings at its visitors, so it's not much more usable than read-only.

This should have been documented in the forum FAQ, not kept from the community.

Fortunately I do have the technical knowhow to figure this out myself, and I do like to share my work with the community.

[endrik]

Thank you, 7im, for dispelling any doubts of loss of forum data with your constant offers of looking up one's last post/post count etc.

And thank you Anand for presenting an easy way to access that data. I am sure 7im has enough to do without having to look for some lost posts, and now anyone can browse that database for himself. Perhaps someone more internet-conscious than me could have found that way, but I did not - and now you made me happy

Another big thanks you to smoking2000 for fixing links in FAHWiki - that helps a lot and your effort is worth a praise too.

Vy 73!

[7im]

...

This should have been documented in the forum FAQ, not kept from the community.

Fortunately I do have the technical knowhow to figure this out myself, and I do like to share my work with the community.

You DO like to share your unfounded wild conspiracy theories as well.

This information was not kept from the community. I have been yelling about it openly since the new forum was started.

And I need to emphasize the words of caution smoking2000 gave. Even too many readers of the old forum could have a negative impact until WW has time to work on it again and make it more usable. Please don't take it for granted, as so many have done before. Following anandhanju's links in the first post to the web archive of the old forum is probably safer for the time being.

[ElectricVehicle]

Is it time to remove links in the WIKI to the old forum? It's just misleading for people to click those links and get dumped on the main page of this new forum.

We could just exterminate the old forum links and if their needed in the future we can see go get them from the WIKI history. Really important subjects from the old forum might be posted into the new forum if that's what we want to do. It just seems that links to the old forum will just be confusing and negative for new users, so nuke 'em or fix 'em!

[smoking2000]

Is it time to remove links in the WIKI to the old forum? It's just misleading for people to click those links and get dumped on the main page of this new forum.

We could just exterminate the old forum links and if their needed in the future we can see go get them from the WIKI history. Really important subjects from the old forum might be posted into the new forum if that's what we want to do. It just seems that links to the old forum will just be confusing and negative for new users, so nuke 'em or fix 'em!

If you're asking me, it's out of the question.

The FCF content needs to be restored, it's our community history!

I've often offered to help, but some people don't care about the community, and would rather let it die.

[uncle_fungus]

The old content is being worked on, but it is not as simple just restoring a copy of the database back to a working forum.

[smoking2000]

The old content is being worked on, but it is not as simple just restoring a copy of the database back to a working forum.

Good that you're telling us this now, because we haven't heard anything about progress on the restoration of the FCF content.

In my view everyone wanting to work on this issue was waiting for WW who wasn't responding to his email. So what is the actual status of this now, other than that it's being worked on? Keeping the community informed about the progress avoids these question, and edits to the FAH Wiki like that of Nonegiven recently.

[uncle_fungus]

We'll be able to rescue most of the posts (beginning -> 11th Oct 2007), but the rest of the database has been corrupted beyond all usefulness which is why it's not a straightforward import.

The hope is that we'll be able to make the post data available in a usable read-only form for posterity, but there is virtually zero chance of ever seeing it return as a working forum.

[smoking2000]

That doesn't sound to good, broken production without backups

[uncle_fungus]

Aye, but there's very little we can do about it now.

[codysluder]

That doesn't sound to good, broken production without backups

It's more like months of progressive database degeneration, all backed up. Every time that WW got the forum running again, the depth of the degeration was probably not noticed.

[ElectricVehicle]

Is there anything wrong with the current forums other than not having the information form the old forums? This new forum seems to work well.

In terms of restoring the old forum information, is it helpful tpo have a list of articles that should be restored first a s a priority since they are linked to by the WIKI? Or is it just a batch operation where restoring one post is as hard as restoring all of them since you have to write code or DB query completely before restoring anything?

I guess it's got to be a real pain, especially if you wanted to match the old post with the new user ids, and then posts have links to other posts that have to updated with the new paths for the old posts. Argh!

I think there need to be a commitment to restore the old content or not within some number of months. Otherwise the WIKI stays in this broken state to content that might never return. And we don't fix the links or re-generate that content because we think the old forums will come back ...someday...

When I hit those old links in the WIKI, I'm looking for the related information, but It's not available and so I want to eliminate them, fix them or start re-creating the content so myself and others don't continually bang our heads on broken links.

If the old forum content won't return for another 6 months or more, I suggest we delete the links from the WIKI. When the old forum comes back, we can go into the history for that WIKI page to recover the links. That way people don't bang their heads on broken links during the extended interval while the old forum content is being fixed.

Oh, who is WW anyway?

[uncle_fungus]

Is there anything wrong with the current forums other than not having the information form the old forums? This new forum seems to work well.

No, the new forum is working well. The only reason we need the old forum is so we don't lose all the information we had (and there's a lot of it).

In terms of restoring the old forum information, is it helpful tpo have a list of articles that should be restored first a s a priority since they are linked to by the WIKI? Or is it just a batch operation where restoring one post is as hard as restoring all of them since you have to write code or DB query completely before restoring anything?

To be recovered properly its pretty much an "all or nothing" process thanks to what info is missing from the corruption.

I guess it's got to be a real pain, especially if you wanted to match the old post with the new user ids, and then posts have links to other posts that have to updated with the new paths for the old posts. Argh!

Yes, a pain it is . There's no real way of matching old posts to users on this forum, so posts will either remain anonymous or be linked in a slow manual process.

I think there need to be a commitment to restore the old content or not within some number of months. Otherwise the WIKI stays in this broken state to content that might never return. And we don't fix the links or re-generate that content because we think the old forums will come back ...someday...

When I hit those old links in the WIKI, I'm looking for the related information, but It's not available and so I want to eliminate them, fix them or start re-creating the content so myself and others don't continually bang our heads on broken links.

If the old forum content won't return for another 6 months or more, I suggest we delete the links from the WIKI. When the old forum comes back, we can go into the history for that WIKI page to recover the links. That way people don't bang their heads on broken links during the extended interval while the old forum content is being fixed.

I'm currently working on getting this up in a usable fashion, but it may take some time (but nowhere near the 6 months you mentioned.). At the moment it's just a case of getting some of the useful functionality working (like search) and streamlining the database queries.

Oh, who is WW anyway?

WW was the webmaster/admin of the old folding-community forum. We all owe him a debt of gratitude as he hosted it out of his own pocket.

[ElectricVehicle]

Thanks for the info, Uncle! I'll leave the links in the WIKI alone for now. Let us know when we can link to the old forum content again and then we can start updating the WIKI links.

Hmmm - WW - The mythical Web Wizard of fah forums. Now I got it. Thanks WW for the old forum which have spawned these forums. I've paid for and hosted a community site before, for electric vehicles, obviously. I know it takes some commitment of time, resources and money! The forums definitely add greatly to the project in getting people started, identifying problems, and improving fah. Thanks to all for the old and new forums!