Hello:
So what you are saying is we are not generating an informational archive as we post on this board. Dang, that's one of the things I liked best about the old board, all that knowledge saved for reference.
Last edited by Don T on Mon Mar 29, 2004 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Don T wrote:Hello:
So what you are saying is we are not generating and informational archive as we post on this board. Dang, that's one of the things I liked best about the old board, all that knowledge saved for reference.
Correct, we are not generating an informational archive anymore. I too felt this exceptionally important on the old board. I used it extensively to find information on purchasing a boat and motor and what to expect from a MacGregor. I was new and glad I didn't have to ask questions that had already been answered on the board. I eventually bought a boat from this site with the information gained mostly from the archives. I also donated to the site with the hopes that the archives would continue and we would have access to the old archive. When the board changed, I was willing to purchase the archives on disk. It is too bad that we have lost such an important feature.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still a loyal to the site and really enjoy it.
I'm not 100% positive, but if you go to the Forum index and click on the forum you're interested in, you'll find all the posts. For example, the "Macgregor Powersailor Discussion" has three pages of posts going back to Jan 5th, and of course, the replies are under them. That ought to be all of them since the new board came online.
Hello:
I went back and tried to find the detailed post I did on the Tohatsu impeller replacement and it is gone. So is that long thread about the right size motor for the mac. Most likely Heath has a size limit for this site and the oldest posts go away when the limit is reached. As I recall it never has more than three pages.
I learned the same thing looking for an older post on propellers. This is really disappointing. It dooms us to answering (and asking) the same questions over and over again; we're already seeing repeats.
If it's strictly a total size thing, I vote that all six pages on the Pacific Ocean thread be sent to Fantasyland, where it belongs.
I accidently had the drop-off point set to a value that was sooner than I thought it was. Sorry about that.
Obviously there has to be a limit of some kind and it would be nice to have an archiving feature again like on the old board. I'll have to work on that but have been too busy recently. I hope to have some more time to look into this again soon.
For now I have disabled the feature that was dropping old posts.
Heath, it seems that the only messages older than March 5th (in the main forum) that were kept are the ones with polls attached. The funny thing is that I created the first poll on Jan 5, and I could swear I told it to last only 60 days (or maybe that just means people can't respond to the poll after 60 days?). So, perhaps the polls are not going away after their time is up, but the normal threads were dissappearing pretty quickly.
Is there any way to bring back the dropped threads or are they gone forever?
And another question, is there any easy way for us to keep our own ongoing private archives of the conversations? For example, does the software have the ability to dump a thread to email or some other text file? If there were more of us archiving the topics, it would put less of a burden on you to store this stuff.
Thanks again for all the resources you put into this web site!
Hello:
Just for grins I did a "select all (cntrl-A)" and "save target as (right click over thread header)" and successfully archived this thread complete with header. Right click on the thread title on the index page works too. Only took 57.1kb. I will begin to save the good threads. If for no other reason than to save long technical posts I and others do. That Tohatsu impeller post took almost an hour to compose by the time I was through editing it for technical accuracy and ease of understanding. I do not wish to have to do that repeatedly. I don't know as my memory would be that accurate after a few months either.
Maybe we should have a best of index page that the great informational threads could be sent. Of course that would be us asking Heath to do more work and make our lives more convenient. Any other suggestions?
PS (edit) I just saved a dozen threads as html documents.
says it has, effective 2003, some 375,000 archive entries. I just found several entries posted in Nov. 1998.
How have they managed to maintain an archive longer and likely larger than the one from this board, now lost to us?
Unfortunately, their board and archive are not Powersailor or 26X specific and so cannot duplicate much of this board's old archive's content.
Also unfortunately, new postings on this board can never duplicate that content either. Indeed, my incentive to answer a newbie's posted "old" question is reduced by the thought of having to spend the time to reformulate and again type in the same old answer, and maybe do it again in a month or two for the next newbie.
So, is our old archive truly and forever lost? Is our present archive only to last a month? A year? If you spend significant time and effort on a post and want it archived for future benifit of others, where do you go?
1. Thanks Heath for your efforts, past and present, in behalf of us Powersailors. Your expenditure of time and $ put the rest of us to shame, and I believe you would have the archives still available were it feasable for you to do so.
2. The archival load might be reduced a bit by summarily deleting posts in which the poster is discourteous or disrespectful to another poster, since that seems to add more heat than light to the discussion. Happily,this board has largly been free of that sort of thing.
