General discussion, User presentation & Admin > Site issues and Suggestions

Dead or Missing Links in older posts

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Atlas:
@Sandman I was wondering about options on hosting/storing some stuff that members may have posted years ago?  I'm a new member and when looking up something, I often get pointed to threads or posts that are a decade or two old and the links no longer work, whether this is to a picture or a file or anything.  As a new member, I can only wonder what info has been lost over time.

Sandman:
A word about older Viperpits posts that are missing, or have dead links---

Over the years, we have had a few site crashes- but we rarely lose actual posts. Old posts often are still there, they are just hard to find through routine "searches" 
:digger:

FYI, searches should be run from the main "Home" page or the "Forum" index page. If you try to run a search while reading a specific topic or post, the search engine may only search the topic you are viewing. The search engine may not go back and run the search on ALL forum posts.  :notes:


Examples of problems we have encountered:
A few members that quit in anger, and spitefully delete their accounts.  :argue:   :grumbl:
When they deleted their accounts, all their photos & posts would magically disappear.
Because of this, forum posts are are now kept, even if they quit and delete their logon account.

A long time ago, many of the GIF / JPEG photo data files were inadvertently converted from binary format to ASCII format during a data backup. This conversion corrupted all the older image files. There were no intact backups at the time, and attempts to re-construct the corrupted image files were unsuccessful. :brickwall:  (We appreciated those with tech skills who attempted to fix this) 

Members would often post photos by linking to their own photo sharing sites (like photobucket or coppermine). If members didn't continue paying their photo hosting fees, or if the photosharing site changed their terms of use, those links went dead. That is why we always recommend attaching photos to your post and saving them here on our server. BTW, browsers load images quicker when they are located on the same server, rather than fetching them from an outside source. Some outside sites limit the number of downloads, or throttle download speeds when transferring files to other web hosting sites.

Finally, some posts include an URL address or you-tube, that doesn't work anymore. Older posts using "http://www", rather than newer "https://www" sometimes cause these problems. Our forum software does not always catch these and re-direct to new HTTPS format. If you click on a link and it doesn't appear to work, check if the referenced URL is formatted as https://www  :whistle:

Still, there are many older Viperpits posts that do have dead links or won't load photos. Some missing photos require the original author to re-load their images, but if they are no longer active, this is unlikely to happen.

Let me know about specific posts that are a problem. This might help identify patterns of older posts that don't work now. We probably can't fix all of them... but we can try

Nigel:
Mark
I cant thank you enough for your dedication and hard work on this site. It's the first thing I look at when I go online. I was really bummed when searching through Jim Keane's (Feathers) thread and discovered almost all his pics are gone. Can you take a stab at it?

Sandman:
I mourned the loss of early photos from charter members like Jim- many of these precious photos were stored on the old "Viperpit.org" site. Our new site "Viperpits.org" did not transfer any of the older files. (This was before I became an Admin, so I didn't have any access to the server side)

Our only hope is for Jim to reload his old photos to the current site. He was occasionally on line last year.

If I had the old forum archives, I'd be happy to search them, but I don't have them. I'll be talking to Mike this week, and I'll ask if happens to have any old backup files from 10-20 years ago.

 :digger:  I know those old archives must be somewhere around here?

Taipan:
Hi Mark
At one stage someone ( maybe a previous admin ?  ) gave me a tar/tgz file of all the old photos on the old website in encrypted format… The old forum software encrypted the photos as they were stored and i was hoping they could be extracted/converted. I had picked up some random support forum where they had supposedly done it.
( edit - i just read your note on the ascii conversion - that rings a bell but i thought there was more to it )

That file might be sitting on the current server somewhere if you can check for a big tar file - i will see if i have it likewise..

But the tests i did were not fruitful. Things might have changed in terms of the tools available, and there might be some package buried on GitHub that can do it now..

FWIW i have some/most of Jim’s files separately anyway - do you want them ? Most pics i dont have though.

Jims posts were the builders bible for so long.

Thanks
T

PS - i had a look for the archive but can't find it. it was a long time ago and probably on an old pc.
also
@TOR had uploaded the most important of Jims pics

http://www.viperpits.org/smf/index.php?topic=6737.msg91547#msg91547

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