Groundhog Day

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Yeah I know, right?

I agree that if people could make a few on topic posts per day then that would go a long way towards attracting new members. When we do get someone new they quickly notice no one has posted in that subforum for six months and then leave.

Yessir, exACTly. As little as five people averaging five posts a day apiece on-topic, and suddenly 'Poly's doing better than what's left of the Pandas were before the 6 announcement, and hopefully, not all in Other Games like them for a couple years. (Nikolai, and now Alexander, are doing a good job in their 6, though, and lately Velociryx has been posting a lot about strategy in Civ 5, of all things - they keep it up through October and it might be a whole new ballgame.)

...And right now would be a good time to start, with a lot of subforums suddenly looking even more slow in the root than they deserve..,

-And you know, Oerdin, somebody had to go first, and that was you, and you be proud of that and keep it up. Stay at it long enough and others will realize that it's in their own best interest to fire up Civ II or something and them talk about it on-topic - as the only way to stop having/seeing the same old arguments with the same old turds. We're gamers, and gaming post content draws Our Kind of People - and that's the way to draw in new turds to OTf to have slightly different arguments with...

[Lorizael]

Contrary to common slander, I post a lot on-topic. People used to do that here, you know - right up to Civ 5 turning out to suck...

Also, get back to me in 10 or 15 years and we'll see if you've maintained the same PPD the whole time.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

...One hopes that an actual female woman will have ruined you with teh sex and teh luv and teh happiness, and you won't have a lot of time, as a notable science philosopher, to slum with us other broken apsies anymore as much as you'd like...

[C0ckney]

I agree that if people could make a few on topic posts per day then that would go a long way towards attracting new members. When we do get someone new they quickly notice no one has posted in that subforum for six months and then leave.

yes, i agree with this. i've just made a few posts in the new civ VI forum. i shall try and do the same every day.

[Lorizael]

...One hopes that an actual female woman will have ruined you with teh sex and teh luv and teh happiness, and you won't have a lot of time, as a notable science philosopher, to slum with us other broken apsies anymore as much as you'd like...

Well, one might have thought the same thing 10 or 15 years ago, too.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I'm not magic, man - didn't know you then.

---

Keep up the good work, C0ckney. -One citizen worker for the community trying a little makes a real difference; two or more can talk to each other and makes the effort a lot easier.

[BlackCat]

[BeBMan]

And don't read anyone's posts.

I even stopped reading my own

[ZEE]

are you going to pick an avatar already or do I have to talk to my... friend again?

[Dauphin]

are you going to pick an avatar already or do I have to talk to my... friend again?

This.

[C0ckney]

I even stopped reading my own

i would say something witty, but you wouldn't read it anyway.

[BeBMan]

This.

i would say something witty, but you wouldn't read it anyway.

If we had a poly-wide FreeThrade agreement things would be so much easier

[Aeson]

Did the "New Posts" search link go away, or am I just missing it?

Drop down menus aren't working in the new theme in some browsers for some reason. Until that is fixed, is the current menu setup ok? I just put "New Posts" at the top level as "New" and "What's New" is "Latest" ... is there anything else from the drop downs that was important?

[Geronimo]

Well anyone can copy paste some text from the caches.

But to actually restore it would need custom scripts to find the threads that need to be restored, open the cached copies, parse the html for thread title, #, usernames, dates, post texts ... then format all that for the database and insert it without overwriting any new threads that use the thread #.

When you save the complete web page from a google cached version we easily get all that info. With respect to overwriting, would that occur on a post by post basis? So if we have had 20 posts in a thread since the roll-back only those first 20 posts since roll back would be at risk of over-write?

[Aeson]

I'm including my response from the WWIII thread.

vB uses a thread number (213208 in this case) to identify the thread. Any apolyton.net/showthread.php/#X will always show the same # thread whatever the X is. In the rollback, we lost count of what # we are on, so new threads are using old thread #. If restoring old threads that are completely gone, they'd have to be given updated # in cases where since the rollback that # has been remade. So if restoring the old 213208 thread, we'd need to change it's URL to be a new #, or it would overwrite this one. Posts have their own ids, and we'd need to make sure those aren't overwriting new ids ... but as long as the post entries have the right thread ids they still work.

It's not very straightforward to take a cached copy of the HTML output (which the browser displays) and restore it on the server. That's because vBulletin (and most website platforms) generate the HTML dynamically from the tables of a database. Sorta like a bunch of big spreadsheets that you pull data from to make a powerpoint presentation. Having the powerpoint doesn't mean you have the database ... and it could be a hassle to take what is in the powerpoint and reconstitute that part of the database from it. The HTML from the caches would need to be converted back into database form. There would be two main tables applicable in this case ... threads and posts. Threads each have a number as an id (this one is 209583), then have the id of the user who started it (HC's is 102901), the thread title, timestamps, etc. Here is the view of the thread table:



Then there is a post table which contains all the individual posts. They have a reference to the thread id, the poster id, they have the text of the post, references to any attachments, etc.

If restoring the threads those would be the two main things. Everything else (attachments, polls, thanks, etc) is either too convoluted and/or unnecessary restore.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult to do if you had a list of all the cached content (URLs) you wanted to restore. It would take time to write and tests the scripts. Generating the list of URLs would be the difficult part. While vB doesn't care about the thread title or URL other than the thread number, Google does, so the thread URL would have to be exact to retrieve the cached pages.

If anyone is interested in possibly having this done at some point in the future when I or someone else have the time to write and test the restore scripts (no guarantees), grab the cached copies of threads you want to save and store them. Sooner or later Google will recrawl/recache those URLs and the content will be gone unless some archival service like wayback keeps them.