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Losing forum posts


mr.devolver

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Hello everyone,

 

has anyone else noticed sudden forum post count decrease in their profile? I had over 1500 posts yesterday or a day before and now I have like 1018. That would mean several hundreds of my posts disappeared. Where did they go? Obviously I'm not one of those people who would want to break forum post records (we all know Guppy cannot be beaten anyway), but losing such high amount of posts may indicate some sort of problems with the database and that wouldn't be cool at all.

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Really old threads are being removed in preparation for the migration to the new system. It is trying to be done in a way that users keep their post counts, but given the horrible vBulletin system, the prune feature doesn't work so moderators are having to do it manually, and it looks like doing it manually may be triggering the user post count to be recounted on deletion.

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my only problem is a lot of my posts were reference material for modding and now its gone. making rebuilding these mods from scratch even harder because both my original files are gone and the forum posts where i got help on them over the years.

 

but yea, hackers was my worry.

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my only problem is a lot of my posts were reference material for modding and now its gone. making rebuilding these mods from scratch even harder because both my original files are gone and the forum posts where i got help on them over the years.

 

but yea, hackers was my worry.

 

That sucks. There should be some kind of archive for old posts and threads and those would be on separate server, so old posts and threads wouldn't really be lost forever, at least until they are completely irrelevant - for example when the game goes gold and you have 10 years old modding tutorial made for Alpha 12 that's not even available anymore, that might be some interesting reading from nostalgic point of view, but it probably wouldn't help anyone to mod their current version of the game, so that could get removed from archive as well. This could be done either automatically with custom script to remove the oldest threads based on various conditions that would make sure the script doesn't remove some stuff that's still relevant or manually by moderators.

 

The advantage of this would be that users wouldn't lose their important posts and threads, neither their post count, forum would be still clean of old posts that may not be that much relevant anymore and the forum itself would be still accessible without lag caused by the slowdowns due to too much data in the database.

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Yeah, I was looking up one of my old threads, and after getting a "not found" error I realised I was back to "Zombie Hunter" status. Brings me back to the old days.

 

Really, though, I hope they fix the forums soon. It's such a hassle to look things up now.

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That sucks. There should be some kind of archive for old posts and threads and those would be on separate server, so old posts and threads wouldn't really be lost forever, at least until they are completely irrelevant - for example when the game goes gold and you have 10 years old modding tutorial made for Alpha 12 that's not even available anymore, that might be some interesting reading from nostalgic point of view, but it probably wouldn't help anyone to mod their current version of the game, so that could get removed from archive as well. This could be done either automatically with custom script to remove the oldest threads based on various conditions that would make sure the script doesn't remove some stuff that's still relevant or manually by moderators.

 

The advantage of this would be that users wouldn't lose their important posts and threads, neither their post count, forum would be still clean of old posts that may not be that much relevant anymore and the forum itself would be still accessible without lag caused by the slowdowns due to too much data in the database.

 

All the posts ARE backed up in a separate place. Whether we will be able to ever access them again or not is another matter. We only pruned threads that had not been posted to in 2+ years. So if someone made a mod 4 years ago but was actively working on it and updating the thread at all during the past two years then it wouldn't have been erased because we went by the most recent post in the thread and not by the original post date. We are of course very sorry for the losses people may be experiencing but it is necessary.

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All the posts ARE backed up in a separate place. Whether we will be able to ever access them again or not is another matter. We only pruned threads that had not been posted to in 2+ years. So if someone made a mod 4 years ago but was actively working on it and updating the thread at all during the past two years then it wouldn't have been erased because we went by the most recent post in the thread and not by the original post date. We are of course very sorry for the losses people may be experiencing but it is necessary.

 

yea, I've been on hiatus almost a year. threads i was intending to update over the next month are gone.

 

even so, a few posts i've made in the last 30 days are gone too.

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yea, I've been on hiatus almost a year. threads i was intending to update over the next month are gone.

 

even so, a few posts i've made in the last 30 days are gone too.

 

I've noticed some posts of mine and others disappearing since we changed to VB5. All the more reason to make the conversion. Apologies about those older posts. Once we are done with the conversion I will ask Brains if there is a way to recover the old posts.

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Don't you know it!

 

Guppy before the purge...

626fb977e34762f8d7c9fb6ec5e76a6b.png

 

And Guppy after the purge...

059dd53a82a81a9b25a62d4894ef7698.png

 

I went from 8388 to 4128.

 

We lost our rep from those posts too.

 

actually thats not even close to how many he had. LOL. they made a special category for him .

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