If that is a reference to this, then that is not what was implied. It was a reference to what was suspected as a vBulletin purge.Quote:
Originally Posted by FenceFurniture
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If that is a reference to this, then that is not what was implied. It was a reference to what was suspected as a vBulletin purge.Quote:
Originally Posted by FenceFurniture
Hi Neil
I would very much like to replace my pics but it will need to be over time as it will take some research and sussing out what is missing. I keep a separate external file with all my pics so it's a matter of reading the each post and reinserting them I guess. My thread is 'Boat Building/Repairing > Tom Cat'. Is there anything else I need to do?
BTW - thanks for the Forum, I sometimes get tempted to move on to the US site, as in this case, but the AU site doesn't get much input so I stick around, keep the Aussie spirit and hope people are looking.
Rgds - Laurie
Hi Laurie
Good on you for having a go.
To date you are the only on who has stepped up to try and fix a bad problem. Bravo. :brava
Won't be easy and could take a long time to sort out and do, but I really admire you for having a go.
Private message sent earlier today with info that should allow you to edit your posts.
Cheers - Neil :2tsup:
PS. If you have any problems please PM or email me.
:missing:
Just checked my attachments in the settings area.
My oldest attachment is December 27,2012, between then and now the others appear to be intact. Prior to December 2012 they all appear to be gone.
I can remember some of them but not all, perhaps the best at this stage I can suggest is that anyone who comes across any of my posts where pix are missing, if they pm me I'll see what I can do.
I became a member in 2005 so there appears to be some 7 years worth lost in cyberspace.
Just as a thought, perhaps a general note tagged onto the earlier threads stating that some pix are missing and if the reader wishes to see them to contact the poster rather than have them wondering what has gone or trying to interpret a post with missing pix.
My initial estimate of lost images was 2400, but I recently realised that I could check even more closely how many images are missing because I store all my Forum images by year in separate directories so all I had to do was look at how many I had posted each year.
All up between 2006 and when I first joined and 2011 I posted 2935 images of which there are about 80 remaining on the forum for the period between 2010 and 2006, so around 2855 are gone.
I have added a note to my signature.
Hi,
It would seem to me, at least in my case, that the couple of pictures that have not gone AWOL in my posts and 'manage attachments' file, are the ones that have been posted in more than one post. I have not checked if the subsequent posts have been out of the black hole period.
I thought that no one gave a rat's when it took so long for responses to my OP but some of the dummy spits since have shown how wrong I was. They must have been getting over the shock. I wonder how long they were missing before we woke up, I had a clue, which I missed, when a new member asked for more details on an early post as the pictures were gone.
Regards
If you were to buy a magazine prior to 2012 and every image referred to were deleted (even the placeholders deleted), the value would be less than zero. It's just a lump of text.
Why not delete all the posts prior to 2012?
No doubt the same issue/topic/idea will be discussed 17 times in short order.
As distressing and annoying the loss of these pictures has been, it highlights to me, just how tentative electronic storage is. It seems that no matter how "secure" the storage is the loss of pics is a real problem. Not only on this Forum but our own storage at home could be facing a similar problem. When we took photos and stored them on slides or photographic paper, storage could be attacked by silverfish or mould, so now we have the electronic equivalent.
I am sorry for those who have taken the losses personally and taken their bat and ball home never to return. It seems its no one person's fault but just "how it is".
I think if we adopt Cliff Rogers statement that if someone needs some pics we should make them available.
Exactly.
I was, at first, unaware of the anxiety this has caused some of our members, it is what it is, we all need to deal with it. Am I thrilled - no way, it has simply happened so let's fix what we can, move on and enjoy the forum.
Here's a few compilations of mine that might amuse.
Each photo represents a few from each year of the missing images.
Don't worry I didn't do these especially for this event - I used to do them at the end of every year to remind me what I actually did in the shed.
Attachment 381408
Attachment 381409
Attachment 381410
Attachment 381411
BobL's picture compilation was incredibly interesting.
A new feature to have a daily preview of somebody's photos and have them clickable going to the related thread?
Show 100 or 200 photos at a time... It would be excellent!
Any linking made on those images above will lead to a bunch of threads without any images in them.Quote:
Originally Posted by woodPixel
:)
As a software developer you'd think of that and write the program only to show threads that had images ;)
After all, how would one display an image if it weren't present? If it weren't present, it wouldn't display, therefore nothing to click... ;)
As a reasonably new member this is absolutely devastating. There are so many old threads I was looking forward to reading but I'm struggling to make any sense of most. The "Challenge to make the homemade router" thread from 03 for example.
As the loss of your data was caused by a 3rd party, can no action be taken against them?
I'll go along with the previous comments, having been a system
administrator (AKA backroom guru) We used to say that doing
a good job as a SysAdmin is like wetting yourself in a dark suit
-- you get a warm feeling, but nobody notices.:U
But if anything goes wrong, the proverbial impacts the air
impeller.
I still work as a webmaster for a group that I belong to, the
above rules apply there, with the addition of major changes
coming by surprise a day or two before they need to "go live".
So, the back room guys have my sympathy, particularly since
it is most likely that the problem was with software that
someone else developed and not with their deployment of
the package. One of the reasons that the website that I
work with is all programmed by me. (Note: I am definitely
not suggesting that this should be the case here. The
sort of forums running here are a common solution and
re-inventing the wheel is not worth the effort, particularly
since I suspect that many of the "support" people would
rather have their hands on a bit of timber instead of a
keyboard.
It would have been nice to see the photos I was looking for,
but I'll live. :sad1:
-Don
Just letting everyone know - I have replaced all my missing pics!! Big job but done and am sticking with this Forum
I've long since forgotten how many and which pictures I included in a bunch of threads, mostly in the Wood Carving or Sharpening Forums.
Same thing happened in two other wood carving web sites. In Wood Carving Illustrated, I'll guess that 10's of thousands of pictures, many TB, evaporated.
I lay the blame solely at the feet of the software developers = they can't find their butts with both hands in a brightly lit room.
Because of these 3 site failures, I'm not willing to shoot the piano players.
But since woodworking is such a visual activity, I really hope that site sponsors pay very close attention to what they get for the money.
Just the other day, I read that VBulliten is getting rusty. Huh? If it ain't busted, don't fix it until it is. Instead, some sites have found
something new and shiny, OOOOOOOOOOHHH! Visual support? I have not enjoyed these tests.
Well done Laurie. :2tsup: I'm proud of you for being one of the only members with the getup and go to actually have a go.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dry Water
It's a bit disappointing a few more who lost pics haven't tried to at least have a go at replace some of them, instead of throwing their hands up in the air and giving up.
I would love to be able to restore all the alost pics but it just can't be done by anyone other than the original poster.
Cheers - Neil :U
The awefulness of this post has come to be true! Glorious Leader is psychic!Quote:
Originally Posted by ubeaut
Reaaallly dumb question: are the images deleted, or has the forum software simply deleted the reference to it? I.e are there orphaned unreferenced images?
I ask as I was (am?) a dev for 15 years (PHP, java, perl, .Net) and could write up a script to find unreferenced/orphaned images, get their date time and try to match those to posts. I could do this at night, gratis, for fun. If that is fruitful, then write a module to admin all the fixes to trusted individuals.
Edit: just found post 28. Sorry :(
The photos were also deleted from my WWF album so yes, gone.
It may not be a simple case of throwing hands up in the air and giving up as suggested as not everyone may have kept a perfectly indexed backup set of the photos posted to the forum.Quote:
Originally Posted by ubeaut
I have always relied on the assurance that the photos posted direct to the forums would be available forever and with upgrading computers over the years a lot of them I have lost myself. This never worried me as I expected the forum's copies to be there.
I still have some that may be I could put back but at my age my remaining time has become too precious to sit at the computer for days to do this.
Peter.
Well done, but how many photos were involved?Quote:
Originally Posted by Dry Water
Also noticed 90+% of your posts are into one thread which would make it a bit easier.
It's not quite so easy when the photos are spread across many forums.
:whs:Quote:
Originally Posted by Sturdee
Im in the same boat as Peter except I had no expectation of "assurance". However, because of my computer naivety, I had slipped into the bad habit of presuming that the forum pictures would be permanent. I even used the forum as an easy way to locate my own pictures relating to a particular subject or project because the forums filing 'system' was infinitely better than my own! To me, the computer is a tool to help me learn and share my woodworking successes and failures. I've had to learn HOW to use it to get, and give, the most from my woodwork. My very enjoyable time on the forum has even overlapped my conversion from film to digital! It has now overlapped my conversion from no 'system' to a rudimentary library BUT, what drives me is my love of woodwork, NOT an enjoyment of binary logic? I have no intention of taking my bat and ball and going home BUT I have had to develop a filing system, I have become sceptical of things that I had previously taken for granted and I am willing to find a picture that someone MIGHT need, but I'd rather do woodwork than research and search for pictures to re-insert into an old thread that no-one may never read again?
The forum, and the people I have met through the forum, have given me great enjoyment and I hope will continue to do so. If anyone wants me to find a particular picture, I am very happy to do it but, in the one instance where this has already happened, I actually did a 're-enactment' and re-photographed it!
LONG LIVE THE FORUM and, once again Neil, thank you.
fletty
I reckon I'd still have most of my photos but I don't have the time to dig through almost 14,000 posts to fix them.
If there is anything that anybody wants a copy of, let me know & I'll go & find it.
What I do is place my photos in a folder named for each of my projects.
However, I haven't been on the forum long and have not posted near as many pictures as others and my posts were not affected by the recent loss.
Thanks for the offer woodPixelQuote:
Originally Posted by woodPixel
Unfortunately it was a major brain fart by vBulletin that did the deletions. The rough story goes something like this: They included a script or something similar in an update, which in rough words deleted photo's that it deemed to unused ie had not been viewed for so many weeks or something along those lines.
Big problem is that they didn't tell anyone about this and it took some 3 - 4 mths for it to be noticed and by this time the damage had been done, not just to WWf but to all forums around the world who installed that particular upgrade. The photos were deleted completely and in some instances completely destroyed some forums who relied almost entirely on photos.
Had vBulletin let their users know up front or early enough the problem may well have been able to be averted, but they didn't, so it wasn't.
We do keep photos on a separate secure site. If we could have restored them we would have done. I'll have a talk to Steven and see if they are all still on the other server but he was pretty adamant that it wasn't possible to restore them even with a specially written script.
Cheers-Neil :U
PS When we found out about the problem we gave the members a headsup and allowed them access to their posts to replace missing pics but most didn't realise they had lost them until much much later when they had been physically removed by the program. I replaced a number of photos in a couple of forums but without any assistance from posters it was almost impossible. To add to the woes there was a change in the way SEO links were written which compounded the problems even further. :C
I saw the earlier post about how the vBulletin did the "unmatched and therefore delete" after I posted. This is pretty typical of how programmers think... but a really good one would think "unmatched, therefore move to another archive directory".
It happens. A lot.
If I can be of assistance... just ask. I'm an uncannily crafty IT guy.
Well, I've had a bit of a go which "took a little while ".
Ploughing through 2 computers and heaps of pix I have isolated 196 which, as far as I can remember are forum related.
My dilemma is.....
1. If I took 6 shots of a project/jig I possibly only loaded up 4 to the forum, I can't recall which 4.
2. How would it be possible to upload this many pix?
3. If uploaded, how could they be put into the correct threads?
4. Due to storage on backup hard drives which have undergone quite a few software upgrades, it appears that the original dates of the pix have changed to a few different common dates, so my scheme of trying to match posting dates to threads doesn't work.
I'm happy to make them available but am open to suggestions as to how.
A few months ago, I had an opportunity to re-attach some pictures to an old thread, as explained in post #7 here: https://www.woodworkforums.com/f8/wob...hlight=wobbler
As noted, I got a request via a Forum email. If anybody has a similar request, do as SawTooth1953 did, and I'll try to find appropriate pictures; not necessarily the originals.
Cheers,
Joe