Fate of the old forums

Site discussion
1

@Freso, I have noticed you have just turned the old forums to read only mode.
And you have said over there that it will soon be archived.

I was wondering what was meant:

  • Will it be moved to cheaper server while keeping topics online with the same permalinks?
  • Will it be removed and loaded 100% into archive.org? And we will have to use their links.
  • Something else.

:wink:

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Yes. :wink:

We definitely don’t want to break links pointing to the old forums, but whether the long-long term means hosting a static HTML copy of them ourselves, keeping all links intact exactly as-is, or having Internet Archive and/or Archive Team archive and host them and we “simply” supply HTTP redirects to the new locations, I don’t know. Either way, links should continue to work for the foreseeable future.

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Greetings busy person!
For the past 2 weeks I have been getting “naughty server” bad gateway notifications when trying to get to the old forums ie. http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?pid=31051#p31051. This was the link to the cool repository for scripts. Is this now gone forever? I was hoping to try some of those “Ultimate” scripts by Celes and others.

Thanks, Llama lover

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The server hosting the forums broke down a month ago or so, and as of now noone has had the time to put the forums back online.

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Thanks for the update. So much to do, so little time! You all ROCK!

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Hi @Llama_lover, try to use topic ID instead of post ID, then put web.archive.org/web/ before your URL to see an archived version, here:

https://web.archive.org/web/forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=514

You can always start browsing from the root if you do not know the topic ID (it is how I found this one):

https://web.archive.org/web/forums.musicbrainz.org/

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Thank you kind Sir!

This is exactly what I needed!

Fred (Llama lover)

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Sometimes, some post ID (pid=) I have, I really cannot find the pages in the Web Archive.
When I can it is still a difficult task.

Web Archive might contain your topic with its topic ID (id=) but it might never contain it with its post ID (pid=) which we already keep as they were provided when we asked for a post permalink.

I also rely on Google search to find topic ID (id=) but as the forum is being down for long time, Google will eventually de‐index those pages.
So I have created an MBH-455 ticket to remind turning the forums back on when possible.

BTW I have just noticed that I wrote a wrong link in my original post, it should have been forums, not forum.

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I often need to link to my 2:30 post data track bug post but its Frequent DiscID bugs topic is unfortunately part of the ones that are not archived. :sob:
Please repair the forums, one day. :slight_smile:

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So what happened to our old topics/threads? :frowning:

I had a personalized VM configuration guide, mostly for my own use posted on the forums. So now they’re poofed? If so, the migration is horrible and an unwise choice. Any experienced and wise administrator knows that it’s not worth migration to a new platform unless it supports a carry-over of old information!

Newer =/= Better

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The server they were on died, and since we’re busy moving to servers that are less likely to die on us, we haven’t gotten them back up again so they can get archived proper. Sorry.

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Bummer.

Is there any chance to get the old posts back, or planning on migrating the information? I was working on a VM setup guide and all the information seems to be nuked.

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It may happen, but it isn’t of particularly high priority.

In your case, however, the VM has changed to much that information from the old forums would mostly serve to confuse you.

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Oh no, the MBH-455 ticket was closed now as wontfix.
I still have links to interesting facts over there that have not been archived. :confused:

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Unfortunately, as far as we have been able to tell, we lost backups of the old forum data during the move mentioned earlier, so as much as we’d like to put the old forums back up in read‐only mode… we can’t. :sob:

(I actually thought I’d written that in this thread much earlier… but I guess I didn’t. Maybe I wrote it in another topic? :thinking: I know it’s more than a year ago that it was discussed on IRC and we realised that the data was completely missing.)

Unless some miracle happen and we find some long hidden/lost backup… what’s archived now of the old forums is what will ever be archived.

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So, the backup by @rob is gone too?

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I really have no idea where that backup file might be. And quite seriously, finding it and putting the huge amount of effort in to clean it up isn’t not a priority for me.

Sorry.

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Ach, it seems that now the old mailing list is down as well.
http://musicbrainz.1054305.n4.nabble.com

Last OK in June 2020:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/musicbrainz.1054305.n4.nabble.com

1 Like