The old forum archive is missing!

[Ian Malcolm]

OOPS, I just tried to look up an old post to follow it up here with how the modification has worked out after a couple of seasons use and I cant get to the old forum archives,

Wayback says its archived them but they aren't indexed yet and Google has lost them completely so I cant work around it.

IMHO their loss is a great blow to the Seagull community and it would be nice to see them back up as soon as possible.

John, I do hope your webmaster has a full backup of the old forum.

In view of the importance of the collected knowlege here and on the old forum, would it be possible to come to an agreement with some other seagull site (preferably maintained by one of the regulars here) for them to host a mirror of your forum archives?

[John@sos]

Hi Ian,

I'm pretty sure we have them still... I will check with the Webmaster.

There was thoughts of having a search facility on them... difficulties with server at the time stopped that..

I will ask.

Regards,
John
SOS

[webmaster (BM)]

Try these links and let me know how you go

http://www.saving-old-seagulls.co.uk/archive2002.htm
http://www.saving-old-seagulls.co.uk/gu ... cproto.htm
http://www.saving-old-seagulls.co.uk/GU ... VE2002.HTM

[Ian Malcolm]

Wow that was prompt. Thank you

Hmm, not bad for a test but I can see Ive just opened a whole can of worms for you.

The articles accesssed through the indexes you just posted links to look OK from what I remember from four years ago

http://www.saving-old-seagulls.co.uk/archive2002.htm
http://www.saving-old-seagulls.co.uk/GU ... VE2002.HTM
both appear to link to the same content - 2001/02
and
http://www.saving-old-seagulls.co.uk/gu ... cproto.htm
appears to have 2004/06

Ive checked a couple of articles I remember posting and apart from variously broken navigation links from each article, it all looks fine

I do hope you still have the 2002 - 2004 archives.

Obviously the pages are'nt ready for prime-time yet I apologize in advance for the amount of free time its going to take you to fix the navigation links

Seriously, though, if time and resources permit, you might be *MUCH* better off junking the indexes and importing all the raw articles into a database and sorting by title and by date, then generating new index pages, a master one by year and a set, organised by general topic if at all possible..
On the indexes its vitally important to retain the poster's name although it might be an idea to obfuscate the email addresses e.g. by replacing @ with {at} or whatever.

In view of SOS being so well indexed on Google, for search why not set up the Google Free Sitesearch, one for the forum and one for the main site. You dont get a back button but you can make the results open in a new window. Should save you a *LOT* of grief although it may take a little while to get comprehensive coverage if you put up new index pages

Thanks for your efforts so far, I'll be keeping an eye on progress next week. For now, its off to the east coast for a training rally, to introduce some novices to the finer points of boat handling and as I have a slight sadistic streak, they will be encouraged to use the Avon tender, both under oars and propelled by one of my Seagulls.
I haven't bought them any earplugs either . . . .

[John@sos]

Thanks Tim and Ian, I am incredibly lucky to have such well informed people about! hope we can salvage some if not all of the old stuff, there was a lot of good stuff in there before the nasties arrived and tim started the new forum for us.

Cheers,
john
SOS