At the moment (May 5, 2018; 7:50 EST), all the Weekend Challenge Entry posts - which also constitute the majority of my lifelong posts at BlenderArtists - are missing.
The primary reason I was a Gold Level contributor in Kickstarter for this migration was to help preserve past posts, many of which contain a great amount of information/tips and even .blend files.
So I hope this can be fixed if it is a problem.
Thanks for all your work on this!
RobertT
UPDATE: as for the āMany Othersā (i.e. posts missing) in the updated thread title, please see this post by another user:
thereās no reason these should have been excluded. Can you tell me where they were supposed to be and provide me a few links to the topics? Links to topics on the old site will do.
Basically all of the āentry threadsā are missing. - There is always one thread, where everyone posts their entries and the discussion goes on before the vote and then there is the āvote threadā for each challenge.
Bart, here are some recent WC entry thread links I was able to track down using Bing.com (Google already seems to be filtering these pages from their results):
Entries Threads (WC 776 to WC 715) are listed below.
There are many more than that, back to the beginning, and I hope those can be found and added back in.
The bulk of tips and how-to posts I provided in this forum are scattered throughout those entry pages, and many of those posts go beyond Blender-version-specific information (which is to say, even if the posts are old, many of the methods I described are still applicable/relevant).
Best of luck with this!
RobertT
Blender Artists Weekend Challenges
Entries Thread URLS (WC 776 to WC 715; as found through Bing.com):
I also noticed Archive.org / WayBack Machine links do not seem to have archived any of the WC entries content, so I dearly hope this important part of BlenderArtistsā history can be rescued and preserved.
My current guess is that these topics were created by a user with an invalid email address. There is code that generates a valid email address so that those users get created anyway, but some upgrade broke it. I modified the code so that those users do get created, so those users should exist, but thatās my current best guess.
Iām downloading the database to my local machine to see what I can find now.
Check with @Helge , he created both the entry posts that are missing and the voting posts, that got transferred. - He used some script to create the voting posts afik, maybe that has something to do with it? - Just guessing of course.
Thanks for looking into this.
One short question: Would it be save for me to just create a new entry thread, now? Or would this cause problems in case you would āreimportā the original WC sub-forum threads?
One thing I just noticed:
The threads that did get migrated, do seem to be based on a previous/older state of the database.
For example I renamed the last voting thread to āChallenge #775 Voting CLOSEDā. But it is called āChallenge #775 Voting OPENā right now. Apart from that, at least one post seems to be missing in that thread. DM9 mentioned the car entry being used as a splash screen of BforArtists: āThe classic car also made it to the splash screen of the latest BforArtists release. :Dā. (including a screenshot: Attachment 523159 (https://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=523159)
This post doesnāt seem to be there anymore.
It would be fine. The importer sticks a custom field in that ties stuff to the old database. It will ignore your new posts.
It seems like all of 2017 and most of 2018 is whatās missing.
Iāve tried re-running the script for posts since 2017-01-01. That didnāt help. I looked for some kind of clash with post/thread IDs, and donāt see anything.
That is to be expected for posts changed since the last import ran. The importer ignores what itās already imported. We started an import about 8 days ago and then froze the forum and ran it again with the new data on Thursday/Friday (depending on time zones).
I see the missing posts in the database, though. I still donāt have an explanation.
Could the missing posts be exported on their own from the old forum and then merged from that separate instance into the new forum?
Perhaps that would help fill in some missing requisite data the current forum expects (and/or filter-out irrelevant data the new forums deprecates/discards)?
I found the problem, though I do not understand it. Somehow, the code that was replacing links to local topics was calling a function that never returned, causing any topic or post that contained
Thereās a certain strange comfort knowing the problem is widespread, kind of like going to downforeveryoneorjustme and hearing itās not ājust youā
Hopefully this means a solution must and will arise, since so much stands to be lost otherwise.
Since Archive.org apparently did not save much, if any, of the previous forum, Iām wondering if the new Discourse format will be more Archive.org - friendly, or if it can be made to be so (e.g. by not using robot exclusion protocol).
The forum is very much like an invaluable research database and even a sort of history maintainer (of Blender and its users) that, when not available, it is far more than just an inconvenience but rather a significant absence of a critical service.
So, having some sort of āoff-siteā backup of that, be it at Archive.org or somewhere else, would be great.
It took so many years to get to where we are with this forum, with Blender, with our projects, and with our community, and I think itās all so worth protecting and preserving, for us and for others, and for Blender.
Just for fun, I tried that regular expression in Ubuntuās gedit, and it only highlights (when examining through search/replace in regex search mode) a portion of the entries URL as is.
If that last character in the regex is changed from * to .*, then the rest of the URL gets matched in my test.
