Old TalkWX Archive

[Copasetic]

Go with #5. You didn't resurrect it when it died, no need to do it now.

There was a full effort to resurrect it when it died. It wasn’t possible. Finding these files a week or so ago is what brought this forward.

I’ll likely take that route. Just need to make a decision.

 

[maroonedinhsv]

There was a full effort to resurrect it when it died. It wasn’t possible. Finding these files a week or so ago is what brought this forward.

I’ll likely take that route. Just need to make a decision.

It should've been possible with an appropriate backup policy - but you're the expert, so I won't argue that.

I say let sleeping dogs lie.

 

[Copasetic]

It should've been possible with an appropriate backup policy - but you're the expert, so I won't argue that.

I say let sleeping dogs lie.

In retrospect, that is true. There are a lot of other factors between point A and point B that complicate that statement that are not worth going in to at this point in the game.

 

[thundersnow]

Short of a full-blown restore of the forum, would it be possible or feasible to do individual topic or thread export to some kind of read only format like PDF just for historical event purposes?

April 27, 2011 is an obvious one. I would maybe add the May 1-2, 2010 flood/outbreak event as well. There may be others. That’s on the severe side. Not sure if there might be winter events in the early 2000s that might be of interest.

Oh! Maybe the Katrina thread (assuming there was one) and potential other historical hurricane threads.

That forum was a witness to history.

 

[Copasetic]

That is why I want to make it available again. I miss seeing it everyday.

No offense to anything current state, but nothing will ever be what that forum was.

I will make it available one way or another.

 

[maroonedinhsv]

Short of a full-blown restore of the forum, would it be possible or feasible to do individual topic or thread export to some kind of read only format like PDF just for historical event purposes?

April 27, 2011 is an obvious one. I would maybe add the May 1-2, 2010 flood/outbreak event as well. There may be others. That’s on the severe side. Not sure if there might be winter events in the early 2000s that might be of interest.

Oh! Maybe the Katrina thread (assuming there was one) and potential other historical hurricane threads.

That forum was a witness to history.

You mean the one that's in the Archive on this site already?

 

[maroonedinhsv]

That is why I want to make it available again. I miss seeing it everyday.

No offense to anything current state, but nothing will ever be what that forum was.

I will make it available one way or another.

You are correct, and it's a shame that it died.

 

[thundersnow]

You mean the one that's in the Archive on this site already?

Yeah- I knew about the 4/27 thread someone was able to reconstruct. An obvious one, like I was saying, but there were other historic event threads besides that one, such as the others I mentioned.

 

[_melody_]

I was thinking about this a little and this may be a dumb idea, but is it possible that you could use a converter script and dump it into a different forum software? That might let you go "around" the security a little. I think that I still have some licenses for VB and XF from that time frame that you would be welcome to use, and I probably have a copy of the install files somewhere. I know that converting between IPB and VB was pretty common. I used to have some contacts in the forum admin world who did a lot of rebuilding / combining of forums and I could try to reach out and see if one of them might have some other suggestions, if you think that might be helpful.

 

[Copasetic]

I was thinking about this a little and this may be a dumb idea, but is it possible that you could use a converter script and dump it into a different forum software? That might let you go "around" the security a little. I think that I still have some licenses for VB and XF from that time frame that you would be welcome to use, and I probably have a copy of the install files somewhere. I know that converting between IPB and VB was pretty common. I used to have some contacts in the forum admin world who did a lot of rebuilding / combining of forums and I could try to reach out and see if one of them might have some other suggestions, if you think that might be helpful.

Excellent point and I've never known you to have a dumb idea.. That is kind of what I'm doing. I wrote some software back in 2019 for a specific need that is for modeling large datasets in various ways. Its actively developed and in use with several large entities.

While this isn't a large dataset, modeling it can really just be to display the data. It's NoSQL based, fast and scalable. Later versions moved away its start with JSON (Document based) to more in the Graph arena.

I've exported the DB sections in to various parts to model. The rest I've deleted, objects like like PM's, Member data except for an ID/Name, etc..

I'm currently testing it, I need to create a few custom calls to the API so it can model the data I'm asking it to provide.. Looks something like this. I need to delete some more objects that are not relevant to the archive.

It's coming along and will be ready soon.

 

[Copasetic]

You are correct, and it's a shame that it died.

Will not argue that statement, sir.

 

[Copasetic]

Update..

IPB and I guess others at the time, maybe still today put their own markups in the post text. So if you display it as it sits, it looks bad. Things like images are

instead of <img src=""> and url anchors as well.

Applying some basic regex to process it before display will clean it up.

$content =~ s/(\)/<img src="/
$content =~ s/(\[\/img])/">/

$content =~ s/(\http)/">http/
$content =~ s/(\[\/url])/<\/a>/[/SIZE]

Finishing up some other post display regex to display emoticons, quoting in posts, escaped chars like ' in "I'm and It's" and this will be ready.

Using the Ivan thread as my test.

[/SIZE]

 

[WesL]

Once we can get a regular format, it would be pretty easy to use the import bot to scan everything. Believe we can even find and replace as it scans to remove tags that are no longer relevant. That was the idea behind the project: pulling the archive from archive.org. A simple ETL process gives us a format to move to the DB.