Notice - Old threads temporarily locked

[John Robinson]

Threads posted prior to 9/4/01 are temporarily locked.

These threads use older technology which has yet to be fully integrated with the new system. In the meantime, to carry-over such threads into the new system, posters will be required to repost the article. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[petuniasevan]

Okay...

I tried to bookmark this (exact title AND inexact).
The link shows in my profile but if I click on it I get the message "No Such Thread".

[No!]

My question is will ALL (each & every) thread from day one be in an ARCHIVE some day that can be accessed?

Didn't some old threads get ERASED years ago?

I was just wondering...

(Something to do in your SPARE time) lol!

[It'salmosttolate]

Roughly how long is "temporarily locked"?

Ashcroft "temporarily locked" all Clinton's files at the FBI. Is this similar?

[John Robinson]

I need to put in place some special programming to merge the old style forum with the new style forum. The old stuff will be paged just like the new stuff.

[John Robinson]

To answer your question, hopefully not long. A week?

[RnMomof7]

Thanks for the heads up

[lewislynn]

posters will be required to repost the article.

Can't do that. That would be multiple posting of the same article and the posting police will swarm in and say: "Already posted here, here and here" < /sarcasm >

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Is there a possiblity that these old threads will be permanently locked?

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I need to put in place some special programming to merge the old style forum with the new style forum. The old stuff will be paged just like the new stuff.

That is good news.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Do you have a time frame on when this will be activated?

[In veno, veritas]

And I just want to do is clear someones tags using my shotgun from a thread that started on 5/26/00. I'll get over it, I guess.

[flamefront]

Thanks for linking to this announcement. BTW, a week is up. Ding.

[John Robinson]

I got hung-up; I won't be able to do this yet until I make a few changes to the database. That will be +1 week after the beta installs. (I'm giving the beta 1 week to prove itself before I make changes that will cause the old programs to break.)

Beta should go up late this Friday night or early Saturday morning, so it probably won't be until at least the following weekend (second week of April.)

[Libloather]

When will this "inconvenience" be over? Yeah, yeah, I know - about a week...

(Hey - this Clinton/Arafat thang is hittin' the fan...)

[John Robinson]

I keep losing this deadline for various reasons. Can you post a new thread with a link to the old one?

[Libloather]

Can you post a new thread with a link to the old one?

The old one? ALL archived threads are old - no? Are old threads now permanently impervious to response?

[John Robinson]

All threads posted prior to Sept 4th 2001 are in an older format that is difficult to manage. Eventually I will implement a hybrid system. It will display the old style thread and replies as the first page, and new replies will be on following pages, similar to the pagination we do now.

Technically, the old style threads are stored as HTML files, each new post causes the file to be rewritten (with the new post appended near the end.) This system was terribly difficult to keep backed up, as any change to any thread would require an archive of the entire thread, which meant on a daily basis hundreds of megabytes would need to be backed up when only a few megabytes actually changed. It also would not work well in an environment where the forum was spread out over several different servers (fault tolerance) which is something I intend to implement later.

The new system has all posts stored in a database, which is easy to "replicate" (backup.) Only the few kilobytes of data that change with each post needs to be backed up, instead of the multi megabyte threads in their entirety. And accessing these posts and adding new posts to threads across a network is trivial. As it stands, I could easily (matter of minutes) change the forum to work with FR's second machine if the first needed to come down for repairs. And eventually, I would like a software program to automatically change over to the second machine if the first one dies unexpectedly.

[Concentrate]

Bump.

[MinorityRepublican]

Thanks for your hard work, we all really appreciate it. :)

Keep it up, we depend on you.