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Old Forum Threads Being Deleted?


Arnox.5128

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According to this: "The existing forums will be locked later today, but our plan is to keep the current forums accessible in an archived, read-only mode until the end of October."All past threads and archives will be deleted come September? Why can't they just be archived and left at that?

Also, realllllyyyy not liking this new forum at all but I'll post about it in the feedback thread.

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@eithedog.4678 said:I don't see any of my previously made posts in the account section - does that mean that all existing content has been removed?

edit: this post does appear in my account, yet no other posts do. Effectively my posting history has been trashed.

It's not so much that it's been removed as it hasn't been copied over. This is basically a brand new forum - everyone is starting from scratch here. The only thing it has in common with the old one is that some of the hyperlinks on the main site have been redirected, and you automatically have an account if you own GW2. In all other ways it's separate.

So no, your old posts won't show up here. Neither will anyone elses. We're all starting from scratch.

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So, indeed, the posts are being trashed.

I don't know how to feel about it - on one hand I've been using forums to report bugs, which have been addressed to some extent in the updates (although I've not received any response on the forums from the support, so...); I wasn't really that active otherwise, so it's either way for me. Still, it makes me even less motivated to write anything now.

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Strangely enough I'm having trouble thinking of anything from the old forum which I think is worth saving. I've been on that forum for 5 and a half years, since the first public GW2 betas and I've visited it almost every day. I have a lot of great memories from the forum. But I've been looking through my old posts, posts I've upvoted and sections I visited frequently and I find myself thinking even the topics I'd like to save might be better off being re-started (like the 'post a pic of your character only if you mix and match') topic.

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I'm with Danikat: any really important threads can be resurrected by any of us who think they are "really important". The only thing I'd like to preserve are statements made by ANet staff that might be helpful to current and future players as explanations of decisions and tea-leaf-reading predictors of future choices. Maybe there's a way to keep just that one archive.

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@Arnox.5128 said:EDIT: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/113625/#Comment_113625

Apparently the old forums were so badly designed/antiquated that mothballing them for good was impossible. C'mon, guyssssss.... :(

Smells like more of an excuse than anything else. Long term storage solutions tend to stand the test of time. I mean, tape drives are still used ffs.

It's more likely that the forum system and the way everything was indexed has been heavily changed (Made obvious by the search functionality), and bringing any of that over just isn't worth the effort in the minds of management & the development team.

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@TheOneWhoSighs.7513 said:

@Arnox.5128 said:EDIT:

Apparently the old forums were so badly designed/antiquated that mothballing them for good was impossible. C'mon, guyssssss.... :(

Smells like more of an excuse than anything else. Long term storage solutions tend to stand the test of time. I mean, tape drives are still used kitten.

It's more likely that the forum system and the way everything was indexed has been heavily changed (Made obvious by the search functionality), and bringing any of that over just isn't worth the effort in the minds of management & the development team.

I just don't know why they couldn't have written a script that went through the database, took all the threads, and dumped them over to literally any other newer forum. Then just locked it down and archived it. Boom. Done. Why would that be impossible?

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@Arnox.5128 said:

@TheOneWhoSighs.7513 said:

@Arnox.5128 said:EDIT:

Apparently the old forums were so badly designed/antiquated that mothballing them for good was impossible. C'mon, guyssssss.... :(

Smells like more of an excuse than anything else. Long term storage solutions tend to stand the test of time. I mean, tape drives are still used kitten.

It's more likely that the forum system and the way everything was indexed has been heavily changed (Made obvious by the search functionality), and bringing any of that over just isn't worth the effort in the minds of management & the development team.

I just don't know why they couldn't have written a script that went through the database, took all the threads, and dumped them over to literally any other newer forum. Then just locked it down and archived it. Boom. Done. Why would that be impossible?

Sure they could. But then they'd have to support that -- do you really think anyone is going to be able to do this without any errors? What happens if a post gets missed? If it's incorrectly formatted and attributes a reportable comment to you instead of to the original poster? It's a bunch of work and I'm sure they have plenty of other priorities, like making sure that the new forums are running smoothly, that requests for features are addressed (e.g. night mode etc).

Meantime, it's possible for players to write a script to copy everything from the forums and post it on a third party site. That might be a decent compromise.

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@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Arnox.5128 said:

@TheOneWhoSighs.7513 said:

@Arnox.5128 said:EDIT:

Apparently the old forums were so badly designed/antiquated that mothballing them for good was impossible. C'mon, guyssssss.... :(

Smells like more of an excuse than anything else. Long term storage solutions tend to stand the test of time. I mean, tape drives are still used kitten.

It's more likely that the forum system and the way everything was indexed has been heavily changed (Made obvious by the search functionality), and bringing any of that over just isn't worth the effort in the minds of management & the development team.

I just don't know why they couldn't have written a script that went through the database, took all the threads, and dumped them over to literally any other newer forum. Then just locked it down and archived it. Boom. Done. Why would that be impossible?

Sure they
could
. But then they'd have to support that -- do you really think anyone is going to be able to do this without any errors? What happens if a post gets missed? If it's incorrectly formatted and attributes a reportable comment to you instead of to the original poster? It's a bunch of work and I'm sure they have plenty of other priorities, like making sure that the new forums are running smoothly, that requests for features are addressed (e.g. night mode etc).

Meantime, it's possible for players to write a script to copy everything from the forums and post it on a third party site. That might be a decent compromise.

Sorry for the late reply.

Actually no, the community can't because it would take wayyyy too long. There's hundreds of thousands of threads on the old GW2 forums. They would have to overload their connection to guildwars2.com with page requests just to do it at a kinda reasonable pace. ANet needs to do it on their end OR they need to give out the backups of the old forum database to the community so they can do it.

As to errors, such things should be readily apparent with a few short tests. And let's put it this way. It's better than having no backup of the old forums at all. And damn it, this is important! Once those threads are gone, all that prior information cannot be recovered. This should have been a priority before they switched forums.

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@Arnox.5128 said:Actually no, the community can't because it would take wayyyy too long. There's hundreds of thousands of threads on the old GW2 forums. They would have to overload their connection to guildwars2.com with page requests just to do it at a kinda reasonable pace. ANet needs to do it on their end OR they need to give out the backups of the old forum database to the community so they can do it.

The community is already doing it, but that's also why there's no excuse for ArenaNet not to continue hosting it themselves as a snapshot. Creating a snapshot like archive.org is easy.

Personally, I've been caching the English forums since they've had the bright idea to delete some of the sections a few years ago. I've cached 6,279,620 posts in 521,407 topics by 211,180 users, which is about 10 GB of text. I'm debating on also caching the attachments, which there are 198,833 of, but that's probably around 200 GB, which I'd have to throttle over 2 months and wouldn't want to keep.

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