Outage

[stellarfun]

The problem with a new board / forum is that you can't readily migrate the database of threads and posts. There are 300,000 posts on this board. And, IMO, 75 percent of the value of archboston is the history, which represents probably less than 10 percent of the total posts.

 

[Blackdog]

The problem with a new board / forum is that you can't readily migrate the database of threads and posts. There are 300,000 posts on this board. And, IMO, 75 percent of the value of archboston is the history, which represents probably less than 10 percent of the total posts.

Well you don't exactly have to copy the database, though that would obviously be the easiest. But it doesn't look like Briv will give us that access. We could make a bot that would go through every post, scraping the content of each post then posting that information into the new forum that Justin7 has created. The one big problem I can see with this method is that we wouldn't be able to post is by the correct user, they would all be posted by an administrator account. Maybe we could do something so that every post that is brought over from this bot would include like a signature or something that included the name of the person who posted it.

 

[whittle]

Well you don't exactly have to copy the database, though that would obviously be the easiest. But it doesn't look like Briv will give us that access. We could make a bot that would go through every post, scraping the content of each post then posting that information into the new forum that Justin7 has created. The one big problem I can see with this method is that we wouldn't be able to post is by the correct user, they would all be posted by an administrator account. Maybe we could do something so that every post that is brought over from this bot would include like a signature or something that included the name of the person who posted it.

I don't think it would be necessary to go that far. I created this list of threads here with the idea that we might be able to start new threads with links back to the equivalent discussion here. Though obviously we would want to archive the content here somewhere else rather than just linking here.

 

[Justin7]

The problem with a new board / forum is that you can't readily migrate the database of threads and posts. There are 300,000 posts on this board. And, IMO, 75 percent of the value of archboston is the history, which represents probably less than 10 percent of the total posts.

I think we all agree with that. The ideal outcome would be for Briv to show up and give someone else admin access, or even just db dump, at which point we could appoint new admins/mods and upgrade/migrate the forums.

I'd be curious to know what caused the recent outage and how it was resolved.

I think it is clear that we can't count on Briv showing up so we're left with a couple options:

a) do nothing, tolerate the lack of moderation and new features, and hope it doesn't go down permanently.

b) Move to a new forum and do our best to back up what we have here.

If anyone has a third option, please share.

Well you don't exactly have to copy the database, though that would obviously be the easiest. But it doesn't look like Briv will give us that access. We could make a bot that would go through every post, scraping the content of each post then posting that information into the new forum that Justin7 has created. The one big problem I can see with this method is that we wouldn't be able to post is by the correct user, they would all be posted by an administrator account. Maybe we could do something so that every post that is brought over from this bot would include like a signature or something that included the name of the person who posted it.

Is this something you have experience with?

I don't think it would be necessary to go that far. I created this list of threads here with the idea that we might be able to start new threads with links back to the equivalent discussion here. Though obviously we would want to archive the content here somewhere else rather than just linking here.

Yes, backing up the current forum as a static site and then linking to threads would probably be the easiest way to handle this. Though if people continue to post here afterward things would get messy.

 

[Blackdog]

Is this something you have experience with?

Not this exact scenario but I have used programs like selenium, autoit, jmeter and badboy to interact with webpages, javascript and html dom objects. Mostly used these programs for automated testing.

 

[Equilibria]

It's also worth noting that the outage got fixed somehow, which means that someone (likely Briv) fixed it, even if he's not here taking credit for it.