First of all, thanks Yoyodoc for the advice. I haven’t been able to get a hold of Chris Allen for quite some time but Ray from Monkeyfinger answered in minutes.
Chris still owns the rights to the site and plans to keep it that way, but according to Ray,“that old SQL is highly vulnerable to attack so he doesn’t want to put it back in its old state.”
What I want to ask, hoping some of you know much more about computers than I, is there any way the old content could be switched to something less prone to corruption? There were over a million posts over the 7 year period and it’d be a horrible loss to lose all of that history.
I feel like nostalgia is allowing people to greatly overstate the value of those old forums.
Yes, there was some useful/worthwhile/historically important info in there, but not enough to merit saving/migrating the entire thing.
Maybe a better option would be to dump the old forum online behind a password and then let interested parties log in, scavenge for relevant info, and use it to build out articles on YoYoWiki?
I understand how nostalgia may blur the actual importance of these old forums and sure most of the million posts are valueless banter… but the start of most of today’s companies originated on those forums. There was a 26 page thread about the first Peak, the early days of General-Yo, One Drop (though much of that is on their archives), and multiple other companies.
The password protected site is actually a fantastic idea, I think I’m going to pass that along
Yeah the Peak history thread is here, I mean the 26 page hype thread before it’s release. I forgot about the Tom Kuhn thread… that was great! Matt Carter and Dave Hall posted frequently, as did a few other huge TK collectors. Where did everyone go?!
Yeah you are probably right. For example the CODE1 designing history would be useful and interesting. But back then you were a moderator and Ben complained we were getting too much front page action so you moved a bunch of the posts around and it became impossible to read the story in the correct order. So yeah not as valuable as it might have been.
I’m sure someone with the relevant technical skills could easily solve the security issues and make it available. But Chris owns it so it’s up to him if he wants to solve it or give it to someone else to curate.
Sad to hear that. But migrating an old platform to a newer platform may be really time consuming and also expensive. Once it is on a new platform, someone has to maintain it and keep it updated.
Last I looked a few years back extreme spin was taken over by spammers, so much so that the first 2-3 pages of each forum were spam - porn, ecigs, credit cards, and phones from nigeria.
Grendel
(The Voice of All Grendel’s world wide.)
18
Mostly the same guys we whacked over at the other place. Great deals on unlocked Iphones - “Just send us yer credit card and we’ll take care of the rest…”
