Pez- So, will the posts be returned?

[Dreadnaught]

I think I'll leave it at that for now.

[Parias]

This is what I'm wondering too. When will we get our posts back?

[Rurouni Storm]

http://rurouni.250free.com/pics/jay.gif

Just concurring with what has already been said.

[Red_Hex]

id like to register my interest in this movement

[FAMS]

I concur with what the honourable gentleman said.

PS. I am off to Hawaii in 2 days :-) but a 19 hour flight and 3 planes :-(.

[Dreadnaught]

Enjoy the sunshine. I hope that new degree is paying for it :up:

[Nanoprobe]

The moogles stole my posts.

[arrrse]

<-- Not impressed at all :mad:

[Cougaris]

I'd be surprised if the posts are actually restored - I'd say he's too busy moderating the Ut2004 forum to remeber us :(

[jessica00]

that and he had no real backups of us.

[Ranger]

If you people are gonna tell me that cops can pull up a porno from 3 years ago but you can't find the forum files from barely a MONTH ago, I'm gonna report you for kiddie porn and have the cops do the job for us.

[Rurouni Storm]

Originally posted by jessica00
that and he had no real backups of us.

http://rurouni.250free.com/pics/inu_ticked.jpg

[Parias]

Originally posted by Rurouni Storm
[img-inu_ticked.jpg]

Thank you, I was looking for something along those parameters. *Saves*

[Rurouni Storm]

Originally posted by Parias
Thank you, I was looking for something along those parameters. *Saves*

I've got a ton, but I've only been uploading them as I need 'em.

[arrrse]

The wierdest thing is that we still don't have a moderator for this 'temporary' forum.
You'd think that if they were really going to not restore the old forum, the'd at least make it official and give us a moderator.

[Cougaris]

Pfft, we don't need a moderator! We practically police ourselves! Seriously, when was the last time a mod had to do anything around here? I'm having a hard time recollecting...

:D

[Rurouni Storm]

Duffy, IIRC.

[Coolie]

Just saying that name might be enough to recall the E-ville of those days.... I do believe it has once before too *peers around warily* :bulb:

[Dreadnaught]

Yeah, Duffy has actually come back here a few times under different names that people haven't spotted. He's also e-mailed me, but I've been able to recognize him. We've made amends nontheless.

Anyway, BACK ON SUBJECT. :)

[RaCail]

You buy the dount, you buy the hole. :rolleyes:

[Rurouni Storm]

Anybody try sending him a PM/Email?

[arrrse]

I pmed cwm the 'crack programmer' guy & he told me to 'yell at pezman, trust me yell at him' so I've pmed him too now (that was all yesterday).

[Greb]

It sucks that we lost all our posts. :(
Wasn't there a team of fans, a long time ago, who archived all the forum content?
Maybe we should start something like that, It pains me to think about all the valuable history this forum has lost through regular "Spring Cleaning". :confused:

Greb

[Dreadnaught]

Except that Pez claims this was an accident that, by all accounts, should be fixable. I'll PM by Monday if there's no response to *****

[Greb]

It just seems pretty convenient. What with UT 2K4 just about to be released, I guess Atari could use the extra space and bandwith. I'm not complaining, Atari are perfectly in their rights to do what they want with us, after all, we do use this forum for free.
I don't know much about the mechanics of this forum, or any forum, in fact. But to delete the entire forum instead of adding a new member seems pretty similar to me opening a word document and ending up reformatting my computer.

Greb

[Nanoprobe]

Greb - convenient it may be for them, and I don't really mind if they don't put the posts back; but even if it's within their rights to do it, do you really think it's fair?

[arrrse]

Much as it would be fairly typical commercial behaviour to just up & delete our forum to 'save space & bandwidth;
a: we don't take up much of either, nor active moderation.
b: if they had really wanted to do it, then this new, unmoderated forum wouldn't exist, if we were lucky we'd just have an announcement from Pezman that 'The Iwar forum has been closed down to preserve bandwith and hard drive space for games that are currently supported & or upcoming games' and no ability to post, shortly followed by no Iwar forum at all.

However, given that I don't think this is some kind of attempt to kill off our forum, I fail to understand why it didn't take about 15mins (maybe a max of about 24hrs? 72 maybe since it was a friday when it happened) to reload a backup & assign the correct moderator.
And yet, we still don't even have a moderator for this 'temporary forum'...

btw, no reply from Pezman yet

[Greb]

Nano - I don't want to throw around accusations here, but if the deletion was intentional I would have liked some sort of notice before-hand. I would like the posts to be returned, not because of the post counts, though i do sympathise with deadnaught. I want the posts returned because It pains me to think of all the discussions lost that may never be returned. I haven't been visiting the forums much lately, though i do read more than I post, I'm developing a bit of a lurker complex. ;)

***** - I'd imagine this forum is a pretty good place to see what Space Sim players want too see in future games, besides thats what Infogrammes orignaly made these forums for, right? Deleting the entire forum means that atari doesn't get its own personal free market research. So I don't see how completely removing the forum and clearing out the old posts are connected.

Greb

[Coolie]

Originally posted by Dreadnaught
Except that Pez claims this was an accident that, by all accounts, should be fixable. I'll PM by Monday if there's no response to *****

Dread, might wanna pm the guy who said that Pez was not gonna be in charge of the boards anymore, um... the guy named Jerry. Either him or cwm, the "crack programmer".

[Dreadnaught]

Pez isn't gonna be in charge? Whoops, missed that...

[sauron1]

No, he got promoted. And now he's one of the participants in a celebrity UT2004 match, incidentally. Heh, today the IWar forum, tomorrow teh World.

I kinda liked Pez, it's just a shame that his final act was to accidentally bag the forum. I think it must have been one of the last things he did on his final day in his old job. :)

[arrrse]

Coolie, as already stated, I already pmed CWM the crack programmer guy and he told me to "Yell at Pezman".
That Jerry guy might be an option though.

Greb, I don't get how what you wrote is related to what I wrote? :confused:

I don't really like Pezman, since my main experience with him is that he's deleted much good posts here including in stickied threads, deleted the whole forum & given me 2 wl points for a double post 24hrs apart in a thread where someone else had already triple posted in 20 mins and got none.

I think post counts have been kept because I'm fairly sure there is nowhere near 1000 posts by me on the rest of the Atari forums.
Anyway, I'm not concerned about post count but the good old threads and posts by Steve etc.

[Greb]

***** - :o Sorry, I've been working all day, so I'm not too coherant.

You said something to the effect of "Why delete the old posts, when they could have deleted the entire forum."
I was trying to say that Atari might still want us around, but just wanted to cut our bandwidth.

I'm not even sure If I'm making any sense now, oh well. :rolleyes:

Greb

[Rurouni Storm]

Originally posted by arrrse
I think post counts have been kept because I'm fairly sure there is nowhere near 1000 posts by me on the rest of the Atari forums.

Actually, you lose any posts beyond a certain number of days any time they have to recount.

I know this because I used to have over 10k. Not like I care, though.

[arrrse]

So I'll be down to about 30 posts next time they recount then.

Greb, I said nothing of the sort.

I said that if they were intentionally deleting the forum to get rid of us, they'd delete the forum & we wouldn't have this wierd unmoderated one we have now, ergo there is not an intent to get rid of us due to the fact that we have this one.

I'm assuming they just can't be bothered even fixing the cock up.
I believe this is an entirely new forum set up by Pezman after deletion of the old one, weren't we the 'Independence War' forum rather than 'Independence War Series' before?

[Greb]

:o Sorry.

Yes, I see your point, I didn't consider this forum was actualy a new one, and the old one was entirely deleted.

Didn't the forum name change after it was amalgamated with the seperate EoC forum that no-one used?

Greb

[Rurouni Storm]

Yeah, we've been series ever since the merge.

[WetWired]

I'd like to point out that the only reason Pezman was ever in the moderators column was to collect all the post warnings in his in-box. Admins and Sen. Moderators can moderate all forums. If there is no assigned moderator for a forum, a warning about a bad post goes to all administrators and senior moderators. As Pezman was an administrator, the only effect adding himself to the moderators list had was to make those e-mails go only to him... so yeah, this forum is still moderated...

[arrrse]

Perhaps we should start reporting posts in this thread then?

[WetWired]

Originally posted by arrrse
Perhaps we should start reporting posts in this thread then? If you want to get banned for abuse of the report feature...

[Ranger]

In that case, why the hell isn't the forum restored yet? I've now lost close to 700 posts because of their ineptitude, and any more and I will do my best to make life a living hell for whatever idiot is running the show.

[arrrse]

What, reporting errors in the database/forum setup is somehow an abuse of the reporting feature?!?! :weird:

[WetWired]

Originally posted by arrrse
What, reporting errors in the database/forum setup is somehow an abuse of the reporting feature?!?! :weird:

When you click the link, it says:
This is ONLY to be used to report spam, advertising messages, and problematic (harassment, fighting, or rude) posts.

[Greb]

Ranger - Why not let people judge your place in the community by your posts, rather than by your postcount?

Greb

[arrrse]

You don't think that the administrator deleting our forum is problematic? :confused:
Especially when said administrator promised to get it fixed and yet there doesn't seem to be any fixing going on.

[WetWired]

Originally posted by arrrse
You don't think that the administrator deleting our forum is problematic? :confused:
Especially when said administrator promised to get it fixed and yet there doesn't seem to be any fixing going on. It says "problematic posts".

[Unheard Of]

Does it really matter that much? Some people have lost post counts, but the count itself shouldn't matter. Do many people go through the archives with a tear in their eyes, as the reminisce on threads gone by?

[Red_Hex]

not i, but your average newbie who cant do this or that benefits from a search. and its kind of sad to lose all that accumulated crap... you might say, "but you never even went back and read it, and it was all worthless jabber anyway", which is true, but i sure feel like this place is cheapened now. think: through various prunings and ineptitudes, my 2+ years here spent entirely within this forum are gone. whats the point of that?

[Rurouni Storm]

We are a people without a past. Hopefully, we still have a future. :(

[arrrse]

Well I think its problematic that Pezman posted that he would get our forum fixed and hasn't yet.

Anyways, I reported his 'um I deleted the forum' post & have not recieved any new wl points nor been banned.
Of course, they haven't fixed the forum or replied yet either... :cry:

[greengrass]

the posts are gone no doubt about it
if support guys have backup/dump the posts should be ok by now and they aren't

[sauron1]

Pez is clearly alive and well, and still a denizen of the Atari swamp, sorry, forum area. See sticky thread above.

To misquote Young Frankenstein, "An angry mob is a terrible thing, and I think it's about time we had one!" So grab your pitchforks, chase him down and demand the return of *Teh Lost Posts*.

[Dreadnaught]

Will be done. This Zionist conspiracy will not stand!






Sorry, spending too much time on far far far left radical websites

[arrrse]

Well clearly its a commie pinko islamic democracy hater-environmentalist-chomsky-reading-gay-sex0ring-bleeding-heart-tree-hugging-bush-hating-ohm-speaking-nature-loving-america-hatinging terrorist attack

Sorry, spending far too much time listening to run of the mill right wing owned & operated media

cut & paste from Natoma's magnificent sig at beyond3d

[Dreadnaught]

Actually, the funny thing about some of the sites I've been hanging out at is that some of them would write about the same thing.

I'd swear that elements of the extreme left and the extreme right have merged. Hatred of gays, Jews and free trade are some things being picked up by both the far left and the far right.

[arrrse]

Sounds more like authoritarian to me.

[Nightwatch]

Its taken you this long to notice?

Let me tell you something: the difference betweem Hitler and Stalin was that one: -
- killed and persicuted Jews,
- sent his political enemies to death camps,
- believed that the individual good was subservient to the good of the state,
- believed that the only way to a strong europe was have it under a few powerful quariling nations

The other ones name was Hitler.

Extreamists act twords the same goals because they are extreamists. The reasons for their hatred are largely irrelevent, as the road to hell is paves with good intentions and reasons

[Red_Hex]

theres one other thing extreamists are, and thats, spelt extremists

its a recognised political theory that the scale is not a straight line but a circle, or a curve. you go far enough one way and you end up indistinguishable from the other.

[Nightwatch]

Darn it, bloody dyxlexia. My spellings has not been the same ever since I sold my soul to Santa... :p

[cwm]

Alright, here's the deal:

On the fated night when kyle pressed the button that made the click heard 'round the forum, he had our hosting company put a back-up of the threads database table on the server for me to get. Unfortunately that file was 2GB of SQL statements. I was hoping they could just hotcopy the old database for me but it doesn't look like they can. If I have a lot of spare time at some point I'll be able to break the 2GB text file up somehow, run all the sql statements to remake the database on my machine and get the info I need to put the threads back.

[Stephen Robertson]

Thanks Cwm for the heads-up! :up:

[Dreadnaught]

Wow, thanks for the info cwm! Do you suppose you could farm that task out to some of the members here? I'm not sure what policies are, but I'll bet that some of the I-War forum members are quite capible of doing it (and have the time on their hands :p ).

Thanks again :up:

[arrrse]

OK, thats clearly more involved than I'd expected.
2gb?! That would be the entire Atari forum right? So you'd need to split out all the Iwar forum posts.

[cwm]

Yeah, it's like every post on the forum. I will run it past some people though, if there's not any sensitive info in hidden forums or anything I'd be happy to toss it to someone.

Also, if anyone has a quick way of grabbing all the lines containing a certain string (ie "forumid=137") from a 2GB text file just suggest it and I'll give it a go if I think it'll work. There's gotta be a little app out there that will do it without dumping the whole file into memory... go now, google calls to you ;)

[Stephen Robertson]

Someone who can write perl scripts would be able to do it. Perl is designed exactly for that sort of job.

[Unheard Of]

I'm not wholly incompetent with perl. Send me a sample (say 50 posts?) and I'll try to help out. If you literally only want lines with forumid=137, then it's exceptionally easy to do:


while (<STDIN>)
{
print STDOUT $_ if (m/forumid=137/)
}


This is untested, but should work, assuming you direct your input file to STDIN, and STDOUT to your desired output file.

[greengrass]

cwm - it's 2 gb gzipped or 2 gb .txt?

[WetWired]

It's not as simple as that. The way that the vB database works, each post is linked to a thread, and each thread is linked to a forum. You would need to either make a list of threadids in the forum, then check each post against it, or for each threadid, grab all it's posts.

I already posted this php script
<?php
$connection=mysql_connect('localhost','username','password');
mysql_select_db('databasename',$connection);
$result=mysql_query('SELECT threadid FROM thread WHERE forumid=137');
$threadids='0';
while($thread=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
$threadids.=','.$thread['threadid'];
}//endwhile($thread=mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
mysql_freeresult($result);
$result=mysql_query('SELECT postid FROM post WHERE postid IN ('.$threadids.')');
$postids='0';
while($post=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
$postids.=','.$post['postid'];
}//endwhile($post=mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
mysql_freeresult($result);
mysql_query('DELETE FROM post WHERE NOT postid IN ('.$postids.')');
mysql_query('DELETE FROM thread WHERE NOT threadid IN ('.$threadids.')');
?>
which can be used to isolate the pertinate information once the DB dump is read back in to mysql, and would be willing to invest the time nessesary to do this. ( Note that the above script is un-debugged)

[arrrse]

^
|
Look, we have a moderator now :weird: