OK, somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but as I understand it, the threads which were archived under UBB (Guy Stuff, Why Pray?, etc.) are still sitting around on a disk somewhere, but in a format which vB can’t understand. What I’m wondering, is seeing as those threads are no longer dynamic, is it even necessary for vB to understand them? What I’m thinking of, is taking the archived threads, converting them to HTML (if that’s not the format they’re in already), and just putting them up as ordinary static files on the straightdope.com website, just like any other web page. It might not be quite as seamless to link to them as it used to be, but at least they’d be there and readable. Any reasons why this can’t be done?
I’m not really sure what the deal is, Chronos, but at least two of the threads that I recently saw referenced as “unavailable”, were, in fact, readily accessable.
Here’s Oral Sex Techniques:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=11010
And here’s Guy Stuff:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=18972
So I’m not really sure how the rumors of threads being unavailable got started
DRY, I pretty sure that I gave that impression to Chronos. I guess I was mistaken; I gotta go read that e-mail from Jerry again. I must have misinterpreted it.
My apologies for any confusion.
If it’s any comfort, UncleBeer, you weren’t the only one to give me that impression. I’ve heard plenty of folks lament the missing archived threads, and last I checked, “Why Pray”, a former Threadspot which was archived, wasn’t even listed in the Threadspotting archives, presumably due to there not being anything to link to. Best I can guess, they were once unavailable, but Jerry (as always! We love ya, man) came up with a better solution, sometime before I came up with my idea.
Well, no apology necessary. I first heard about the deleted thread problem through Ruffian’s lament that her “Oral Sex Techniques” thread was gone. Either Tubadiva or Lynn Bodoni was also operating under this assumption.
I first thought that the belief that this thread was gone might be mistaken when I did a search and thought “Hmm…these searches have results pretty far back.” I searched for the thread in question, and found it almost immediately.
No harm done, in any event.