How far back

[Ed Dittmer]

is stored? I was looking for a thread from December and I can't find it.

Thanks

[Steve Price]

Hi Ed

All Salons, Mini-Salons, and the discussions associated with them are saved in our Archive (http://www.turkotek.com/archive/archive.htm). About 10% of the other threads get archived, too, but the rest are simply deleted after they get no new posts for 10 days or so. There's a Google search utility on our home page and on the archive page. If you select "Search Turkotek" it will find the pages in our archives that contain the terms you enter into the search field.

Regards

Steve Price

[Ed Dittmer]

Thanks Steve. Any particular reason for this?

[Steve Price]

Hi Ed

There are several reasons.

1. One of our goals is to become a useful reference source for our main target constituency, collectors of antique rugs and textiles. Most threads simply lack the content that is likely to be of long term interest to those people.
2. Server space is inexpensive, and we have lots of it. But it isn't free, and what we have isn't unlimited. Since we typically have many images in our discussions, archiving all of them would greatly increase the amount of server space that we occupy.
3. Archiving threads, especially long threads, is fairly labor intensive. I archived a thread with 70+ posts yesterday; it took about an hour. Our message board software would let us keep threads indefinitely, in principle. But - and it's a big but - it would keep them as part of an ever-expanding MySQL database, and databases crash from time to time. The things that are archived are first converted to static web pages (HTML pages). Not only are they extremely stable, I am able to keep full backups of all of them on my hard drive and can restore any or all of them on the same server or any other server even if the one we're on crashes totally or if our web hosting service gets bought out by one of the many unscrupulous web hosts and we opt to change hosts. One of our former hosts refused to give us FTP access to our site when we told them we were leaving.
4. There are already other sites that, in my opinion at least, fulfill any reasonable desire of folks who want or need extremely wide ranging databases of rug images and descriptive information. They provide a valuable service.

The decision of which freestanding discussions get archived is usually just my judgement of the potential interest of the content. Any reader is invited to request archiving of a specific thread. I don't get many such requests, but have never refused to honor one.

Regards

Steve Price

[James Blanchard]

Hi Steve,

Occasionally I have "archived" a discussion thread by simply saving the pages as a web archive (*.mht) file. It saves the pictures along with everything else. The only problem is that I am not always sure when the thread will be closed.

One thing that you might consider is posting a message on a Discussion thread that is about to be closed and removed without archiving letting folks know that this will be happening in the next day or two. Then if anyone wants to save the content they can do so on their own.

Just a thought.

James

[Steve Price]

Hi James

Filiberto uses that system, too, and that's the first step in the method I use to create the archived files (I save as a complete web page rather than as an MHT file because I'm not sure every browser can read .MHT pages).

I've thought about posting alerts a few days before deleting threads, but there are some problems in that. The biggest one is that the cue I use for archiving or deleting is the date of the most recent post in the thread. I don't know any way to post a prominent alert in a thread without making the alert the newest post, thus putting a more recent date on the thread.

But anyone who wants to keep any thread in his/her personal archive can look at the date of the most recent post in that thread. If it's 8 days old, the thread will probably be deleted in another two days. Occasionally, I'll remove something after only nine days, sometimes not until the twelfth day or so; this varies with the other distractions in my life at the time.

Regards

Steve Price

[James Blanchard]

Hi Steve,

Sounds like a reasonable systems to me.

Thanks for all your efforts on this. :clap:

James

[Steve Price]

Hi James

That's why I get big bucks for doing it.

:laughing_2:

Steve Price

[James Blanchard]

Hi Steve,

Maybe you and Filiberto would do better if Turkotekkers only kept up with their membership dues!:laughing_1:

James