Posts in old threads with no poster name

This afternoon, I decided to try to find my own first post. I succeeded, but I also scanned the search results and decided to browse some of these 18±y.o. threads. In several instances, I found posts which, to all appearances seem to have no author. I also note that these phantom authors are ALWAYS listed as “Guest”, and never as “Member” or “Charter Member”.

Here’s an example.

If they are known, what are the technological mechanisms that lead to a result such as this?

Are the usernames affiliated with these posts considered unrecoverable?

I believe that those arose from the conversion from UBB to vBulletin. Apparently, not all of the data translated correctly. I suppose that, in principle, they might be recoverable, if someone still has a backup of the old UBB database lying around somewhere, but even if they do, it’d be a lot of effort for very little benefit.

I’m not entirely sure why some names got butchered and not others, though.

When searching by poster, I am only able to see the most recent 500 posts. That includes my own. Is there a setting to change to see more than 500 posts?

I recently found the archive link at the bottom of the page, that’s another time-waster I don’t need.

Close, but not quite.

When the board began, it was using one version of UBB. At some point it was upgraded to a later version of UBB. Then it was converted to vBulletin. Oddly, the posts created in the later version of UBB came over just fine, but the even older posts created in the earlier version of UBB did not — the names of the posters somehow didn’t make it across.

No. But you can find a poster’s earliest 500 posts by choosing on the search page “in ascending order” under “sort results by”.

If there were more than 1000 posts, you could find them piecemeal by selecting “find posts from x years ago” “and older”.

Thank you.

Or, just search “all forums,” with your own username, leave keywords blank, and check “any posting date” and “ascending,” rather than “descending.”

You’ll still only get 500 posts, but they’ll be your OLDEST instead of your newest.

That only takes me back to the middle of 2000 - more than a year after I started here.:frowning:

That’s because the older ones are probably UBB original edition. And your own posts can’t be found by name.

Did you by any chance use a signature back then? Signatures remain intact. I can find my ancient 1999-mid2000 posts by searching for the signature string I used at the time: “Designated Optional Signature at Bottom of Post”.

March 1999

June 1999

Sept 1999, by which point UBB 2 (or UBB 19 or whatever version was one higher than when the board started off) was in use and my username appears on the post.

I should explain how I came to realize that it wasn’t the conversion from UBB to vBulletin that made the screen names vaporize:

a) I found multiple threads on which posters specifically said “well, here we are after the conversion to vBulletin, looks like we made it” or some such thing, and the posts prior to that in the same thread were intact with usernames. AND

b) I was there at the time of the UBB–>vBulletin conversion, and if all the old posts and threads prior to the converstion had landed with no usernames, we kind of would have NOTICED. That didn’t happen.

There’s some sloppiness and vagueness of exactly how old a post has to be to show up missing the username of the person who posted it. It isn’t per the thread (a given thread may start off without usernames and then suddenly they start showing up). I do recall that there was an upgrade from one version of UBB to the next, and it didn’t seem to cause problems. I kept poking at it and finally decided that if a thread had gone without posts during the period after the first UBB upgrade, its UBB posts lost their posters’ identities during the vBulletin era, but if the thead HAD experienced UBB posts during the subsequent-to-upgrade period all of its posts would tend to come through intact. That also is consistent with experience: if there had been a long-running post dating back to the original UBB software days that was still being posted to at the point that we switched to vBulletin, and the oldest posts had suddenly gone all anonymous, someone would have clicked on the thread title and started reading from the top and gone WTF?!??, and it just didn’t attract any attention like that. So it makes sense that the ones that lost their usernames were the threads that had become inactive during the first UBB software days, didn’t get posted to at all after that or else only after conversion to vBulletin. Eventually someone noticed there were a bunch of very old threads that appeared to have been posted to anonymously by “Guest” but it was quite a while after the conversion to vBulletin.

That would make sense, then: The UBB software apparently didn’t update all of the old posts at once, but did it piecemeal, as each post was called up for the first time. But vBulletin didn’t know how to do this piecemeal updating, and once it was installed, UBB wasn’t around to do it either, so the updating never happened.