Notebook Review forum archive – NBRCHIVE

[mujtaba]

35 minutes ago, Dannemand said:

Most of the mods that were active the last few years plus a few more are connected through a mail group, and they ARE aware of this and the other migration sites and were watching the efforts unfold. Reactions generally being along the same lines as what @Custom90gt, @John Ratsey and I have posted here.

As pointed out, some of us have joined already, either here and/or at notebook-review.com. I think the putting ones feet up slant is spot on: Not all former mods may be ready to resume duty, at least not right away. For my part, I know I wouldn't be able to commit the necessary time, so I am mostly lurking here.

The forum is small enough and not enough trolls are present to provide the entertainment anyways!

[Dannemand]

11 minutes ago, mujtaba said:

The forum is small enough and not enough trolls are present to provide the entertainment anyways!

True 😁

I should have added that we have @mujtaba to thank for keeping the mod squad together in that mail group!

[mujtaba]

29 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Most of what I am doing right now is "a few minutes of regex work + a few minutes of testing + wait multiple hours for the change to be applied to all threads site-wide" so it's not too bad 🙂

Do you want to setup something like ElasticSearch to provide content search? I hate ES with the passion of a thousand burning suns, but I think it works well enough, especially for static data. Google isn't very good at finding anything anymore 😞

[Aaron44126]

5 minutes ago, mujtaba said:

Do you want to setup something like ElasticSearch to provide content search? I hate ES with the passion of a thousand burning suns, but I think it works well enough, especially for static data. Google isn't very good at finding anything anymore 😞

So it's actually been a while since I did public web work.  (I work on internal company web apps but nothing huge.)  I have no experience with ElasticSearch but if someone else wants to help me set it up then sure 😛

[Custom90gt]

5 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

So it's actually been a while since I did public web work.  (I work on internal company web apps but nothing huge.)  I have no experience with ElasticSearch but if someone else wants to help me set it up then sure 😛

 

I've heard @mujtaba loves working with ElasticSearch!

[Sandy Bridge]

I actually kind of like the dumb bullet pointed list.  It takes awhile to load on the larger ones (e.g. Dell, where it's > 10 MB), but it's really nice being able to find all the threads related to my laptop very quickly once it loads.  There are tradeoffs; if I remember who started a thread but not the title it doesn't help much.  But in the short to medium term (until sorting of the forum-view display, perhaps?), I'd encourage leaving them up as an option.

Regex work... kudos on proficiency with that.  For me, if I have a problem, and I think, "I could solve this with regexes", then I usually wind up with two problems.

[Ishayin]

On 2/2/2022 at 6:47 PM, Aaron44126 said:

I just updated the archive.

...

This is brilliant, thank you!

I've noticed that the header now only appears on certain pages. I thought it was only appearing on shorter pages, but then I found an except of a longer page (here) where it does appear. Though most pages seem to be missing it (e.g.).

More importantly – how do you navigate to subsequent pages in a thread? I can't see any way of doing this, and only one page loads. You do seem to get to ~400 posts fitting onto that one page, but it is still a long way off all of the posts for some of the longer threads.

[Aaron44126]

49 minutes ago, Ishatix said:

I've noticed that the header now only appears on certain pages. I thought it was only appearing on shorter pages, but then I found an except of a longer page (here) where it does appear. Though most pages seem to be missing it (e.g.).

More importantly – how do you navigate to subsequent pages in a thread? I can't see any way of doing this, and only one page loads. You do seem to get to ~400 posts fitting onto that one page, but it is still a long way off all of the posts for some of the longer threads.

I'm running a job right now to add the banner to any pages that it was missed from.

Right now there is only one page per thread, so if you're seeing threads that didn't run to completion, that's all that we have.  There was an issue with earlier versions of the archiver that caused it to give up on a thread if certain errors happened, which caused issues with a number of very long threads.  @Sandy Bridge worked hard in the final hours to go through logs and recapture broken threads, but I believe that he was working off of a list from the logs of forums that he originally downloaded (and not forums downloaded by the rest of us).  We just didn't have time to loop back around to all of these before NBR shut down.

I am planning to add a link to the archive.org version of the thread at the top of each page so that might help if they got a better capture than we did.

[Sandy Bridge]

10 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

I'm running a job right now to add the banner to any pages that it was missed from.

Right now there is only one page per thread, so if you're seeing threads that didn't run to completion, that's all that we have.  There was an issue with earlier versions of the archiver that caused it to give up on a thread if certain errors happened, which caused issues with a number of very long threads.  @Sandy Bridge worked hard in the final hours to go through logs and recapture broken threads, but I believe that he was working off of a list from the logs of forums that he originally downloaded (and not forums downloaded by the rest of us).  We just didn't have time to loop back around to all of these before NBR shut down.

I am planning to add a link to the archive.org version of the thread at the top of each page so that might help if they got a better capture than we did.

That is correct; I ran queries to identify threads that needed re-run on the 30th and 31st, but only had the archives I had made.  Unfortunately, there likely were a few in forums that I didn't download as well.  For the most part, I was the one archiving a lot in the early days, and by the time we had more people archiving several of the errors that had formerly caused the archiver to give up no longer caused it to give up, but I don't doubt that there were some edge cases that slipped through.

They are also more likely on longer threads.  If there's a 0.02% chance of each post causing an archive to give up (hypothetical figure but in the right ballpark), it's a lot more likely to happen across 2000 posts than across 20.

[Talon]

Thank you for preserving as much as possible! Great work!

[Ishayin]

 

On 2/4/2022 at 1:06 PM, Aaron44126 said:

...

I am planning to add a link to the archive.org version of the thread at the top of each page so that might help if they got a better capture than we did.

17 hours ago, Sandy Bridge said:

...

They are also more likely on longer threads.  If there's a 0.02% chance of each post causing an archive to give up (hypothetical figure but in the right ballpark), it's a lot more likely to happen across 2000 posts than across 20.

OK, thank you very much to both of you for all the hard work! I really hope the missing content was saved by the archive.org team and can be rescued. Particularly this thread which I mentioned above should have 1,102 pages of posts per the original forum structure. I had made a separate archive of it here, but unfortunately that only captures the first page.

...Oh wait, I've just checked archive.org, and they do indeed have a full capture of this thread which appears to have all of the posts here 😃  I don't know if you can scrape that with your software, but if you can add a link to it at least as you mentioned that could be very useful for any other people looking for it.

Thanks again!

[Samir]

38 minutes ago, Ishatix said:

...Oh wait, I've just checked archive.org, and they do indeed have a full capture of this thread which appears to have all of the posts here 😃  I don't know if you can scrape that with your software, but if you can add a link to it at least as you mentioned that could be very useful for any other people looking for it.

Thanks again!

If this thread is super-important to you, then even though it will take a bit of time, I would print each page to a pdf (or save directly) for your own records.  I did this on the legacy site with threads important to me as there wasn't much effort at the time to archive the entire site.

[Sandy Bridge]

6 hours ago, Ishatix said:

 

OK, thank you very much to both of you for all the hard work! I really hope the missing content was saved by the archive.org team and can be rescued. Particularly this thread which I mentioned above should have 1,102 pages of posts per the original forum structure. I had made a separate archive of it here, but unfortunately that only captures the first page.

...Oh wait, I've just checked archive.org, and they do indeed have a full capture of this thread which appears to have all of the posts here 😃  I don't know if you can scrape that with your software, but if you can add a link to it at least as you mentioned that could be very useful for any other people looking for it.

Thanks again!

Thanks for posting the links to the thread in both archives.  For a couple reasons.  First of all, it's great to see that archive.org's efforts appear to have been largely successful.  We'd seen that they were doing something, and later had some archive files that resisted our efforts to open them, but this is the first time I've seen concrete proof that what they did largely worked.  With a little bit of missing CSS, but the content's there, which is the key, and navigation between pages seems to work too.

Second, I was able to determine that while I did the Sager and Clevo main forum, and was able to go through my logs and figure out which threads were incomplete (or to be precise, failed for a reason we'd identified as a cause of failure), I did not do the Sager and Clevo Owner's Lounges sub-forum, and thus couldn't run it through my error detector at 3 AM on the 31st.  Thus, it is indeed one of those that falls into the "if we'd had another day or two and say, 'We think we might have it all, what are we missing?', what would we have found" category.

It might be possible to re-integrate it, but at this point I'm still in the step-back-and-do-some-other-things mode (one of which is trying to encourage forum participation by starting threads here).  I thought I'd caught up on rest, but when I woke up this evening I felt noticeably more refreshed than I had when I woke up this morning.  And I hadn't really planned to fall asleep in the afternoon, so I must not have been fully re-rested at that point!

 

[Samir]

30 minutes ago, Sandy Bridge said:

I thought I'd caught up on rest, but when I woke up this evening I felt noticeably more refreshed than I had when I woke up this morning.  And I hadn't really planned to fall asleep in the afternoon, so I must not have been fully re-rested at that point!

I've learned really quickly that when you have the ability to work odd hours/at will, your body will fall into other sleep and work patterns as it sees fit.  A lot of times I fall into a 4/8 pattern where I sleep for 4 and am awake for 8.  But then I may break this and get on a 30hr day cycle where I work for about 20hrs and sleep for 10hrs.  Right now I'm a bit messed up since I slept at 6:30am and when was up and working by 10:30am, but now I'm past daylight hours and will probably sleep in the next 3hrs and wake up whenever and get back to work again...

[Aaron44126]

• Finished cleaning up "dead links" in the XFA-downloaded threads.  Everything might not be "done" yet but at least clicking different things like the date, permalink, user posts count, etc. won't throw you to a 404 page.
• Submitted to Google for indexing; might start seeing results tomorrow.
• Next goal is adding "View this thread at archive.org" links to each thread, which probably can be done tomorrow.  Then I will take a stab at adding pagination to the XFA-downloaded threads so that very long threads won't kill the browser.  That will be later in the week.

[At0mX]

Hey Guys !

@tomX here from NBR!

Just wanted to shout out a HUGE THANK YOU for doing all this! Great job on the archiving and making it available to all of us geeks and enthusiasts out there! NBR user and fan since 2009 😉

Simple question : In order for all this knowledge not to be lost, are you guys willing to share the NBR backup files with us? (I hope this is OK to ask, if not I will edit my post) the more the merrier in backup terms 🙂

Keeeeeep up the awesome work!

[Aaron44126]

2 hours ago, At0mX said:

Simple question : In order for all this knowledge not to be lost, ae you guys willing to share the NBR backup files with us?

Once I have it mostly cleaned up (fixed up links and such), I will make an archive available to NBR regulars who would like to keep an offline copy.  If something happens that prevents me from hosting NBRCHIVE, someone else could take that over.

[John Ratsey]

Am I right in thinking that once all the clever stuff is finished then all the threads here will be linked to the corresponding titles here? I can then make a sticky at the top of the new Samsung forum with links to some key threads in the archive.

[Aaron44126]

58 minutes ago, John Ratsey said:

Am I right in thinking that once all the clever stuff is finished then all the threads here will be linked to the corresponding titles here? I can then make a sticky at the top of the new Samsung forum with links to some key threads in the archive.

Your two links are the same, but if you're talking about linking those to the thread list here, then yes, that is my intent.

[Dannemand]

2 hours ago, John Ratsey said:

Am I right in thinking that once all the clever stuff is finished then all the threads here will be linked to the corresponding titles here? I can then make a sticky at the top of the new Samsung forum with links to some key threads in the archive.

That's a great idea, John. You could even copy and repost some of the existing sticky's which contain a ton of links to threads and posts. In addition to being useful for members looking for answers, it might also direct Google searches to the live forum instead of to the archive.

[John Ratsey]

10 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Your two links are the same, but if you're talking about linking those to the thread list here, then yes, that is my intent.

Thanks for the confirmation and figuring out that I'd had a copy - past malfunction for the 2nd link.

[jasces99]

how can i help can we get a fund going to rebuild the database and site completely maybe workon grabing a site for 20 yr lease or something@

 

how much data did the site actually have? as in space curious....

what all is needed ....

 

maybe we could work on a vip membership ? to support site to never again get washed out , as well were are the back ups lol , no offense in the it world should have back up images of the site data base , might not have all but most correct???

 

 

Mr Fox any input

?

[Reciever]

2 hours ago, jasces99 said:

how can i help can we get a fund going to rebuild the database and site completely maybe workon grabing a site for 20 yr lease or something@

 

how much data did the site actually have? as in space curious....

what all is needed ....

 

maybe we could work on a vip membership ? to support site to never again get washed out , as well were are the back ups lol , no offense in the it world should have back up images of the site data base , might not have all but most correct???

 

 

Mr Fox any input

?

These are all being explored in due time. That being said, NBR is gone. There is no database as we were never granted access to it. 

 

We did archive nearly everything that we could which was a majority of the site. So while its currently out of reach for most, its not gone.

Once we flesh out a few other things I will present means for how people can contribute, just depends on timing and means etc etc since its only myself and @Hiew paying the bills currently.

 

Also @mention's work the same way as before so be sure to take advantage of that function :) 

[jasces99]

keep me posted please i was busy setting up new office and didn't even know was closing till yesterday , wish i had known ahead of time but yes let me know that site saved my butt numerous times!

[Ishayin]

On 2/7/2022 at 1:35 AM, Aaron44126 said:

• Finished cleaning up "dead links" in the XFA-downloaded threads.  Everything might not be "done" yet but at least clicking different things like the date, permalink, user posts count, etc. won't throw you to a 404 page.
• Submitted to Google for indexing; might start seeing results tomorrow.
• Next goal is adding "View this thread at archive.org" links to each thread, which probably can be done tomorrow.  Then I will take a stab at adding pagination to the XFA-downloaded threads so that very long threads won't kill the browser.  That will be later in the week.

 

The archive.org links are a brilliant addition – thank you again!