I object to the rampant archiving of old threads

You’re absolutely right, mhendo, and I withdraw the suggestion. I think that if database size is an issue, there are certain threads more than others that would be missed far less if they were archived (some of the more overt let’s-post-for-the-sake-of-padding threads in MPSIMS, for example), but you’re certainly correct that that’s not a judgment that can remotely be handed down on a forum-by-forum basis.

Maastricht:

That makes me sad. I don’t even dare search for some of the more memorable threads from my own past.

This sucks.

A friend of mine was just asking about “Burning Man”, that annual art festival out west, and I wanted to link her to Zenster’s excellent description of his experience there. He wrote a beautiful piece.

Gone.

Alas, some seem to have disappeared down the memory hole.

However a few of your pithier contributions remain.

Man, I remember those sparring matches. You and I were both a bit more dogmatic back then than we are today, I think. Good times…

The subject of archiving is one near and dear to my heart. Call me a data junkie. I hate to throw anything away, even tho the useful nuggets may be outnumbered by the junky ones. Data mining is so much more rewarding when there’s more data to paw through.

And some data is irreplaceable. Who are we to decide what should be kept and what should not? Things change, people change, styles change, values change. What is junk to day might be gold tomorrow. Save it all, I say, and let the future sort it out!

But in a practical sense, we are left with a cost/benefit ratio to decide what to keep. Obviously, there has to be a level at which it is not affordable to keep some stuff. So what is that level?

Adam Osborne once wrote, upon noticing the steady trend towards the cost decline of data storage, that eventually the cost of storing a byte would be so little as to be effectively zero. At that point, he said no one would ever delete files, as the effort required to delete them would exceed the cost to retain them.

While I’m not sure I will go that far, Adam had a point. I have a friend who takes beautiful digital pictures, prints them out, then deletes them from her storage drive. Yet the cost of saving them would be about 25 cents for several hundred (on a CD or DVD) and she is the beneficiary of a doctor’s income, so 25 cents is not hard to come by. Yet she makes not attempt to save them.

This is really foolish. Imagine how valuable these pictures might be to her children’s children’s children a hundred years from now? Imagine what it might be like to have similar data from 200 years before now? Beyond priceless.

Therefore, I urge the SDMB admin team to make every effort to preserve as much data as possible. If logistics make it temporarily difficult to keep data online current, at least store it in the best manner possible for future restoration.

And if the problem is SQL and/or vBulletin’s limitations, the time is long overdue for those programs to be revised to handle a million times more data. The history of computer progress is a continual one of expanding limits; of RAM addressability, hard drive partition size, cluster sizes, and database record limits. Time once again to boost them up.

Make a trend line – show the cost of increasing storage vs needs. At present trends, will next year’s needs be met with next year’s budget? I think it will.

See how many of our Watershed moments are missing. I did start a thread about this in ATMB and was told that they aren’t gone forever. I’d be nice to know where they are and when they’ll be back.
Monkey butlers is gone. That really, well-- hurt, for want of a better word.

I would like to note that, in the far distant past, an announcement was made prior to archiving threads. Members were given an opportunity to bump old threads that were worth keeping, and then archiving was done on a purely last-date-posted basis.

As far as I ever heard, that worked fairly well. I’m not sure why the practice was discontinued.

And I must say I found the Cheesesteak’s post quite intriguing. I’d never figured up the income on the site and I must say that his figures seem conservative. That’s a lot of moola for not much back.

Fantastic post, Musicat.

Maybe they will offer a CD collection of the old threads for say $39.95…You know to get money for maybe new hardware or SW upgrades. :rolleyes:

Considering that the ability to search the entire board archive is one of only two things that actually adds any value to the service we’re paying for here (the other being the ability to post after the initial 30 days) this is quite an unfortunate turn for the business model.

That seems to me to be, at best, a rather imperfect solution. All it does is ensure that some other more recent thread, which may be just as interesting, gets pushed down the queue for every one that is bumped to the top.

While this might be a technical issue in terms of software capability and database, it certainly isn’t a technical issue in terms of storage capacity. Even with all of its millions of posts, the content of the Dope probably doesn’t exceed 10Gb of hard drive space. That NOTHING in today’s world of super-cheap storage. The question, then, is how to make this information available to members. Even if it were as plain text files that could be downloaded, that would be better than not having it at all.

I wouldn’t count on seeing the posts again. And I wouldn’t count on any answers to your questions in this post, either. The powers that be have made it abundantly clear that:

a) There’s something wrong that’s limiting the size of the database. Note that this isn’t a limitation of the software itself, but something specific to the install here.
b) On the prioritized list of things to take care of at the Reader, the SDMB falls somewhere between sorting the recyclables and fixing the squeaky hinge on the backdoor.

As the OP of the first link in the OP of this thread, I’m getting pretty disgusted by this shit. A new server was promised months ago. Is it here? Is it online? Who the fuck knows (except at least Jerry, I guess)?

Posters in other threads who were familiar with vB assured us that the SDMB was using an old version of the software and that a simple and quick upgrade would put our old posts back in order. This has yet to happen. We pay thousands of dollars to them, but still, we are their red-headed stepchildren, and no apologies or admissions of wrongdoing are forthcoming (let alone actually fixing the problems).

They just don’t give a fuck, and I’m getting pretty goddamned sick of it.

Yeah, I’ll re-up when the time comes, because I love this place. I suspect many others feel the same way, and that the Chicago Reader is taking advantage of that fact.

Through their posts, the members of this message board have made this among the most well-written and erudite message boards on the Internet.

From Day One, The Reader seemed not to care, and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

What a wasted opportunity…

I just wanted to say that the watershed moments thread is pretty amazing. Well, amazing for how many of the linked threads no longer exist, anyway. Slash and burn, indeed.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I just don’t see the archived threads ever returning in any form; after they’ve been absent a while, people might still miss them, but the level of voiced complaints over their absence will fall (if only because there’s nothing new to say - they’re still gone), the backup medium containing them will gather more and more dust and will eventually be lost, corrupted or overwritten; the perceived effort of restoring the archive will only ever increase - the perceived requirement for it will dwindle.

Or I might be completely wrong.

I wish I remembered where I read this, but somewhere someone said that the size of all of our posts was a little over 2GB. If this is true and they’re telling us they’re deleting posts based on lack of space, then the server must be from the early 80’s.

While I appreciate xash’s response in the second link in the OP, I’d still like to hear from an administrator. Tubadiva asked for an example of a searching problem, I provided one, then she disappeared. It would’ve taken two minutes out of her busy day to run the search I suggested and repost that she sees the problem and will address it. The fact that it took a week of my bumping the thread every day is piss poor customer service.

I don’t think it’s the size in bytes that was killing it so much as the number of records in the database.

The current combination of board and database software versions limits us to a set number of posts. I can’t be arsed searching for the details but I seem to recall the bottleneck is in mySQL (the database software that stores everything). The problem could be fixed by upgrading the software but that’s not a trivial job and probably something that’s planned with the arrival of the new server. Other boards use newer versions of the software and don’t have this limit. Maybe.

For what it’s worth I agree that archiving the threads is a terrible shame, I have a sneaking feeling that it’ll end up being too much work to reinstate them and we’ll never see them again. I hope I’m wrong.

Anyroads, I’d like to ask a question again.

Yeah – my gut feeling is it is related to a pointer problem. It’s time to move up from 24 bits to 48 or whatever.

Thank you, Sir. It’s nice to be appreciated!

I just happened to think of a CD I bought long ago called “The Hacker Chronicles.” subititled “A tour of the computer underground”. It is a jumbled collection of (text) BBSs from years ago, pre-Internet, back when anyone using such tools might be a borderline criminal (what would an ordinary person use a BBS for?). It is really interesting to read thru the conversations, now frozen in time. It includes circuits for phone phreaking (black boxes, blue boxes, orange boxes) and code for viruses. Probably nothing here would work today, but it is a fascinating glimpse into an age, culture and technology. I’m glad it was preserved for posterity (as long as a CD can still be read!).

That’s the least they could do.

I don’t know whether the old threads are gone, or just that searching doesn’t turn them up, but there are things I know I said here years ago that I can no longer find, and it bugs me. For instance, I’d like to know what I was thinking four years ago as Bush took us into war - were my criticisms then really what I remember their being, or am I mentally improving the record?

And that’s one of many.