I wonder whether we’ll even get a straight answer as to whether the currently missing threads WERE archived, or whether they were deleted altogether.
The assumption many seem to be making is that they were. I wonder if that’s a good one to make, given the response to these sorts of threads (i.e. none).
Likewise. I’m very sad about this.
Once upon a time they even floated the idea that the posts from the AOL era, which were allegedly preserved, would somehow be ported to vBulletin and made accessible to us.
Guess that’s not a top priority at the moment.
What would be wrong with providing a link to an RTF file with Bookmarked / Hypertexted Titles for every archived thread? Aren’t we just talking about text here? Open it in WordPad or Word or whatever, text search for a word in the title, click to read the thread as bookmarked text. Don’t tax any server at all. Bare bones.
I actually suggested this once before, but well, you know…
I’m here because I enjoy it, but I don’t trust this board to be here tomorrow. I expect it to disappear, so it just doesn’t surprise me when it does–bit by bit.
There are great posters here, and great moderators. Arrogant admins, and a shit-for-brains business model that should have been drowned at birth.
To me, those are the facts. The board can’t survive the idiocy of the administration. Funny how often those words are said. X can’t survive the idiocy of the administration.
Or maybe my shoes are just too tight.
Because, even if the missing threads have been saved, they’ll be in the form of a database dump. Somebody would need to convert that to some readable form somehow.
Just what I was thinking. The ATMB thread on this very issue didn’t turn up a confirmation that this was even happening the way most folks assume it is. Xash said he’d inquire, and a few posters there have noted more success searching for some folks’ old threads than others.
I think there’s a bit of gun-jumping going on at the moment.
You mean it could be that the threads have been archived, and it could be that they’ve been deleted altogether? How can it possibly be jumping the gun to assume the best of those two scenarios?
Or, if you’re suggesting that the threads are all simply misplaced as the result of a wonky search engine, you’re forgetting that the administration has confirmed that threads have been offloaded and archived. Are you saying they’re incorrect, and all we need is better search-fu?
So? Let whomever wants to download and read it do the conervting themselves.
Then perhaps I misinterpreted the intent of the ATMB thread. I read it to mean that there WAS no “official confirmation.” After all, why would xash have to ask the admins about something that’s already been confirmed? If I’m mistaken, then what exactly is that thread asking about, if not the same topic as this one?
The thing that always bugs me about this situation is that it seems like keeping the entire database has been left as a tech decision, as if it has no bearing on the actual character of the boards- simply a frivolity.
Regardless that you care or not about old threads being saved ad infinitum , there can be no arguing that it distinctly defines the nature of the boards - one way or the other. OneCentstamp said it well early: “Archiving turns the SDMB from a library into a magazine rack.”
With all due respect to Jerry, this should not be left as a “If it’s worth it, I’ll do it” type decision. I think that maintaining the “[a]bility to search the massive SDMB message database” should be a core concern. It is part of the sales pitch, after all.
Well it taxes the server during the download, my back of an envelope calculations shows the normal text version of the whole SDMB (plus ‘disappeared’ threads) to be around 2 to 2 1/2 gb. So the archived threads are a couple of 100Mb at a guess. So the repeated download of the file would tax some server somwhere.
The SD website could host the archived threads statically somewhere and it’d be a fairly low overhead. But then you’ve got the complication of searching, which could be solved by letting Google index the archives but that’s unlikely since the boards themselves aren’t archived.
Of course all of this involves work, perhaps doing a database dump and letting people download it and untangle the mess themselves is the best way. But it would require an explicit copyright excemption from the Reader, which is probably a sticking point. In addition means they can’t restore the threads in the future and make them viewable on the website (with advertising / other revenue streams).
I’ve asked in the past what would happen if someone offered hosting space and effort to transfer the archives to a site somewhere else (i.e. give one person the data and they’ll deal with the everything) and the response was to wait and see what the new server and upgrades bring. That probably has copyright issues too.
Oh, and Leaper this thread is one of the ones that contains an official confirmation of the ‘offloading’ of older threads.
I guess I shouldn’t hold my breath to get an administrator’s response to this, huh?
This appears to be the best one can expect for now. Of course, she posted the annoucement about testing the new server shortly thereafter.
Based on that, I would be absolutely shocked if we get any of the archived or offloaded threads back in any form. It seems the most we can hope for is that, if the search engine gets fixed, some threads we thought were archived and/or offloaded simply turn out to have been hiding.
…And maybe then we can try to get some sense of just how many threads are actually gone for good.
This is a bit ‘finger in the air’ because we don’t know how Jerry is choosing threads to archive. I guess it’s either by thread id, thread start date or last post date, I don’t want to strain the search engine but we can tell some stuff from the watershed moments thread.
From that thread we can see that threads with ids of 80000+ are still here, a bit of investigation shows that thread 77900 is gone but thread 77901 is still with us. As are threads 77902 to 77910, I didn’t go further but it looks like threads were disappeard on the basis of id (I could be wrong, I don’t want to kill the server by pulling every thread id to see.)
Now some of those threads may be disappeared for normal reasons, and others (near the start) were probably test threads etc. So that’s less than 1% of the total content which is not too bad. What worries me is that we’re only around 10,000 threads away from the 9/11 threads which I really don’t want to lose …
Of course I’ve I’d bothered to look at the announcements I would have noticed that we’re testing the new server at the moment. So let’s give the powers that be time to sort everything out at the new place and then see where we stand.
Probably the wrong place for this but thanks to Jerry and everyone else for making the new server a reality.
I searched for some of the missing OP’s over on the new server.
They were there, so at least the search engine problem will soon be fixed. 
Well, that’s good. Although, of course, it doesn’t vitiate my original concern unless no threads in the “massive SDMB database” are being archived after all.