Museum of Yo-Yo History

Would be nice to see if the folks here at YYE would have any interest in host a wiki… they already have a store, forum, and blog… i think the bar would be pretty low for them to add the service, and tie in authentication with yye auth… :thinking:

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I think you’re underestimating the amount of work it would take to make a single-sign-on YYE account; forum and store accounts are already separate, the forum uses a managed Discourse instance who host it themselves (iiuc), the store is a Shopify store who host it themselves, I’m not sure about the blog though.

Regardless, it’s a cool idea but something to think about after we know whether the museum’s data is recoverable.

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That would be neat. probably would just be hosted but on a different service or platform just share the same domain. Also I would be totally cool if there was a donate here button somewhere for said service or even this forum to help keep the lights on or heck donate time managing it but that requires trust and all that garbage. regardless i would be happy to throw some money or time or effort at keeping the info about this (yoyo) community alive and well.

This is a sad blow with the recent news of imager and other big photo repo sites deleting old and anon photos. I imagine many images of old yoyos and tricks are going to disappear over the next few decades only to be “re discovered” some time when we are all long retired and gone…

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Chimera is Grahame Wright. He wrote the code for the site. Maintained it for about 15 years. The last 10 years he has been too busy with job and family. So the code got older and older.

The data is recoverable I believe, backed up. But I don’t have expertise or $$$ to hire someone to write a new site.

DH

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Ahh yeah I was just looking at the previous yoyomuseum thread and saw that, the correct person I should’ve tagged is @OG_Chimera

If a dump of the data can be provided I’m more than certain there are members in the community that would volunteer to contribute (whether monetarily or through development/operations/testing effort etc) towards build a new site from it; I know I’m willing and this thread seems to show there are others.

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I know nothing about building sites but if we can recover the site would a free website like go daddy or something like that work so its at least cost effective. The information would be nice to have, all the Freehands had production amounts and everything, and now all that info is gone.

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The data is safe, don’t worry about that. The system was custom written using PHP’s original MySQL interface and over the years PHP versions have deprecated MySQL in favor of MySQLi. When we were forced to upgrade from PHP 5 to PHP 7.x a few years ago I found a script that would convert modern MySQLi commands into MySQL and allow the Museum to continue to run. Unfortunately PHP 7.x is also EOL now, so we’ve been forced to go to PHP 8.x and that stopped the translation script from working.

What needs to happen is to either find someone willing to run a server running PHP 7.x which wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea for a public-facing site as it’s just asking to be hacked. A better option would be for someone to convert the existing DB abstraction layer scripts over to MySQLi. I’d love to do it, but I can never find the time. It’s really not that big of a job, maybe 400 lines to go through but unfortunately some of the functions I’m using don’t have a MySQLi equivalent so there would be more coding to make a replacement.

I’ll be honest, I’m surprised that people were still using the Museum other than Rick and Dave adding things every now and then.

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Anyone willing to take this offer? I wish I could encrypt the website but can’t because I don’t have the skills. But @OG_Chimera do you know how much it would cost the community to save the site?

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Also @OG_Chimera its the only reference tool us collectors have in today’s world thanks to YYN going away. The same day I found this site was down I found out that the Glasslab is also down now. Freehand History is being erased and this site is the only one I know that has production #'s and stories behind the yoyos.

I’m speaking personally with the FH history but I know for a fact when I’m buying zeros I use this site to confirm #'s. Hopefully we can get this fixed as I’m just selfish towards fhz’s. But every company has history that we cannot afford to lose.

@Isaac @Captrogers @CatFoodScience

What are your thoughts

Well it’s working…somewhat. There are probably a bunch of things broken and if people can point them out that would be great. But it is functional!

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Oh my goodness thank you so much! Was it alot of work. Can i send you a yoyo for your troubles?

You ought here doing the lords work.

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Nice did you find an updated script for php 8.x? Site Seems to work now.

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Well, past me was something of a genius so rather than every script passing direct database commands I wrote an abstraction layer so the scripts would say “get me exhibit number 100” and my abstraction layer would actually do the database query and return the results. Because of this, I simply had to rewrite the abstraction layer to pass the correct commands used by the new version of PHP, but the bulk of the scripts could remain untouched. Like I said I’m sure there are some places that are still broken but I couldn’t find any immediately.

I don’t really yo-yo anymore, I used to do it mostly at work but since the pandemic I work from home and don’t have as much need for the stress relief. I appreciate the offer though.

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From one dev who often works on legacy code to another… Thank you so much!

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You sound like a true software developer. There is always a way to abstract…

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Nice I get what you did enough that I could create a story and assign it to a dev and know what results to expect lol.

Maybe @codinghorror can help? such a great data base

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The code isn’t OSS, is it? I’m a backend developer that focuses on engineering productivity. I’d be happy to make some contributions but would like to know what I’d be signing up for first :grin:

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