removing archive forums from website

[Captain Ewok 1,900]

Just an FYI. Unless there is terrible objections I am considering removing the archived forums from the website. That is posts older than January of 2006. Chances are people here no longer even use them. The old forums is a security risk as the software is outdated and impossible to upkeep because of that.

Please feedback your comments. I may be removing them very soon .

Edited July 20, 2006 by Captain Ewok

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

I don't know why, but that depresses me. There's so much in those posts, especially from my own visa journey. Oh well, do what you gotta do

[mawilson 2,133]

Oh no.........please don't.......at least not yet.....

Are you running low on disk space?

Can we convert the old post database to the new format?

If you absolutely have to remove it, can you give us a week or so to make copies of some of the old posts? Please?

Edited July 19, 2006 by mawilson

[AnaAndDaniel 0]

I say cut it off asap. Sure a lot of infor could be culled from a lot those threads, but really who goes back that far? A lot of useful info is already documented in the FAQs. Plus current members have the "latest" going ons to share with newbies.

Daniel

:energetic:

[Captain Ewok 1,900]

The old database was partially corrupted ages ago (which was why we upgraded and did not carry the posts). I actually today had the old database become corrupted again and am restoring it, again.

My plans if you guys want, are to possibly write a custom script that may spit out all the old topics into html files. I don;t know if this is easily done so it may not happen. If it does, then you can search old posts that are in html files and not from the database. Either way it is good that I take the old forums off line asap for security which is more important . I will no mattter what keep a copy of all the posts offline if anyone wants something (and to keep all the old posts for 'historical' sake). You never know when the old posts will be important to have .

[mawilson 2,133]

I say cut it off asap. Sure a lot of infor could be culled from a lot those threads, but really who goes back that far?

Obviously not you.......

Please give us until the end of the week, Captain, will you?

[Captain Ewok 1,900]

Also the old info is dated and my not always apply to this day and age. I can see though reasons to keep it around so I probably will in some form (if even offline). Right now the old forums is not working as the database is corrupted again and is being restored . There are somethign like 700k posts on the old forums.

[mawilson 2,133]

My plans if you guys want, are to possibly write a custom script that may spit out all the old topics into html files. I don;t know if this is easily done so it may not happen. If it does, then you can search old posts that are in html files and not from the database.

Sounds great - can you do that please??

Let me know if you need any help, SQL-wise.

Gupt - are you good with SQL?

Can you just import the old tables as in

CREATE TABLE NEW_TABLE_NAME AS

SELECT [ *|COLUMN1, COLUMN2 ]

FROM OLD_TABLE_NAME

or is it not that simple?

[Captain Ewok 1,900]

The old forums dB is about 1.5GB. Pretty big. Running an OPTIMIZE TABLE on the posts table totally corrupted it as it was too big. That is why I am restoring it. . I was planning on doing the same command on the new forums posts table but decided to test it on the old one first. Glad I did .

[AnaAndDaniel 0]

I say cut it off asap. Sure a lot of infor could be culled from a lot those threads, but really who goes back that far?

Obviously not you.......

Please give us until the end of the week, Captain, will you?

that is very true. i recall when i first came here.. i did try to go back as far as possible reading ppl's personal journeys tryuibg to lear as much as possible. i am really apreciative of that. but, if it is causing major headacheds for the site admins and causiong the site to bog down, then it is best that it go. like ai said earlier, critical info has been posted on faqs and the tacked on permanently threads. more current info can be culled from more recent threads or current members.

Can you cite specific cases/examples of threads that are 'critical'? Maybe if we made such a list the admins could concentrate on keeping thst info somehow.

Daniel

:energetic:

[Captain Ewok 1,900]

My plans if you guys want, are to possibly write a custom script that may spit out all the old topics into html files. I don;t know if this is easily done so it may not happen. If it does, then you can search old posts that are in html files and not from the database.

Sounds great - can you do that please??

Let me know if you need any help, SQL-wise.

Gupt - are you good with SQL?

Can you just import the old tables as in

CREATE TABLE NEW_TABLE_NAME AS

SELECT [ *|COLUMN1, COLUMN2 ]

FROM OLD_TABLE_NAME

or is it not that simple?

I am not sure where you are going with that... the old tables on the old forums are for different version of IPB. They are in a different format (table wise). What might be nice is to find a script to output all the threads there into html files. Then we can get a search engine here to search them. I would periodically do the same for this forums thus keeping the database smaller and faster. Right now all I can do is prune topics (i.e. delete them).

I say cut it off asap. Sure a lot of infor could be culled from a lot those threads, but really who goes back that far?

Obviously not you.......

Please give us until the end of the week, Captain, will you?

that is very true. i recall when i first came here.. i did try to go back as far as possible reading ppl's personal journeys tryuibg to lear as much as possible. i am really apreciative of that. but, if it is causing major headacheds for the site admins and causiong the site to bog down, then it is best that it go. like ai said earlier, critical info has been posted on faqs and the tacked on permanently threads. more current info can be culled from more recent threads or current members.

Can you cite specific cases/examples of threads that are 'critical'? Maybe if we made such a list the admins could concentrate on keeping thst info somehow.

Daniel

:energetic:

Great idea. If you can identify info to keep from the old site I will make sure to get that.

[Sharon 1]

Oh nooooooooo!

My wedding vows are in the old archives somewhere and I wanted to get them! We'd had our wedding vows on a Word doc. on my hubby's computer but lightning fried the hard drive and we lost everything. I wasn't too worried cuz I knew I'd copied our wedding vows into a thread where someone was asking about having written your own vows. I was going to do a search and get them in the archives! Are they lost now too, Captain?

*It was in the Off Topic Forum - a thread about wedding vows...

Edited July 19, 2006 by Sharon

[PlatyPius 5]

Converting MySQL to HTML:

http://www.dbput.com/tutorial/mysql-to-html.htm

Failing that, you could download the MySQL file as a tab-delimited text file and use a Perl script to output it in logical order.

[Bosco 1]

I say delete if it makes your job easier. I cannot imagine managing this site!

Rebecca

[PlatyPius 5]

Converting MySQL to HTML:

http://www.dbput.com/tutorial/mysql-to-html.htm

Failing that, you could download the MySQL file as a tab-delimited text file and use a Perl script to output it in logical order.