Forums and IRC - September 24, 2010

[orth]

We've been able to return 650ish posts to their proper threads.  If the post was the first post or the last post in the thread and it was posted in the last 31 days it will now be in its rightful thread.

A bit of an issue with this is we are unable to know exactly who posted the post, so we set the poster to be the person who started the thread.  If you see this as a problem in a thread, we can assign the post to the proper person.  Just tell us who originally wrote it.

[Hellblazer]

If possible to get the stickieds thread of the Cailomel goods and wares forum back to date please, that would be greatly appreciated

[Dorganath]

@Hellblazer and everyone else:

We're attempting to restore as many threads and posts as possible.  We're trying to attack this in a methodical way, and the intent is to get as much as we can restore and identify put back in its rightful place as quickly as possible.

As you can well guess, this cache of posts we have spans both the public and private sections of our forums, with of course varying degrees of privacy, so our efforts are taking this into account as well.

As there seems to be some misunderstandings, let me try to clear up a few things.

What we have is a cached list of posts that have been build up over the last month.  This means that we have a good chance of still having a month's worth of the past two months of missing posts.  Because of how the cache was built, there is a slight chance that we may have a bit more than the last month worth of posts, but that is by no means a guarantee, a promise or anything more than a hope at the present time.

Also, this cache is basically only a post ID number, a timestamp and pre-rendered HTML content.  That's it.

There is nothing to identify the thread to which the posts belonged.  There is nothing to indicate who made the post, outside of some clues contained in the post contents themselves.

To put this another way, there is no quick, easy or simple way, outside of a line-by-line review, to distinguish which were the stickied posts in a guild's forums from private CDT entries from Trade and Market Hall posts.  

While we understand your desires to have your important information restored, asking us to put one group of messages over another is neither helpful nor necessary.

Instead, as has been stated above, if you can provide any information that would help us identify some posts over others, for example if your guild uses a particular posting format for certain things, that would be very beneficial.  Also, providing us with a list of guild members by character and forum names may be helpful in reassigning the posts to the appropriate people.

We have been whittling away at the cached posts, and we have gone from something like 8300 down to about 2600 by eliminating posts that are already present, eliminating null entries in the cache and matching up the first post in each thread with what is available.  A handful of posts has been identified because of some consistency in formatting. Clearly that's an improvement, but the hard part is yet to come.  If we can find patterns, we can restore groups of them with a minimum of manual effort.  Otherwise, it's just going to take time.

To everyone who has supplied us with helpful information, we appreciate your contributions.

To anyone who wants to help, please provide us with any information that might be helpful, such as "All my CDT entries in the thread 'My CDT' start with 'Dear Diary'" or "I sign all my posts with '-me'".  Any patterns we can find...any commonalities that may exist...these things will help us pare down the list a bit more, making less of a manual task out of it.

EDIT: Also, an approximate date (and time if possible) when posts were made would be helpful as well in matching things up to the right places.

So bear with us.  We're getting there.

[Hellblazer]

Talia (Talia)
Gormunguard (Chazzler)
Breanna (Anamnesis)
Hanta deshaldi  (Mastiff of liv)
Fehriel (Hellblazer)
Eleandilethessa Quil'lyn (Xaltotun)
Draman (Grid Blader)
There was some post made by Elohanna.

As for helpful hint in the thread themselves I'm afraid there isn't much I can do about that.

[Acacea]

They can't see the authors of the posts they have. "It was posted by Talia" doesn't matter, they have no posts by Talia. Talia doesn't exist in those posts. They are just numbered. That's why it is hard for them and why is is going to take them a little while. Any phrase at all found within the post would help, but authors don't exist.

(edit for clarity) If you mean that they sign their names that way inside them, it would be more clear

[RollinsCat]

Hellblazer:

here's how to send them a list of post IDs to speed up your restoration.

choose your browser of choice (I was using google until it got sick of me so this is using Yahoo)

Type in a search - I tried "site:forums.layonara.com Cailomel Goods - Layonara"

it brought up this:
http://74.6.239.185/search/srpcache?ei=UTF-8&p=site%3Aforums.layonara.com+Cailomel+Goods+-+Layonara&fr=yfp-t-976&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=site%3aforums.layonara.com+Cailomel+Goods+-+Layonara&d=4656663798089366&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=6f20ba14,43cf375f&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=q.3_3BoLeVk_Oa8RAFdrMg--

this has posts to 08-30-2010.  Using Google you can select "More results from forums.layonara.com »" if it's offered and get more cached pages.  This will require some hunting and playing with search parameters.

Right click the web page and select "View Source".

Start a spreadsheet.  three columns - post ID, thread/forum, and forum name of poster

from the srpcache file that pops up when you select "View Source", find the following: or

(as an example).  In this case 1609062 is the post ID and will be repeated several times inside each post.

List post IDs, thread, and forum name of poster.  send to team.

Should make things faster, hope this helps.

[Hellblazer]

Thanks mate I'll give this a try.

[orth]

Thanks to a lot of grunt work and knowledge of the community, Dorganath was able to restore and associate 812 more missing posts to their proper threads.  In a small percentage of the posts he was not able to ascertain the poster exactly so we used a dummy account "Unknown User".

In addition we found a way to restore 202 of the rightful posters to correlate to their posts in cases where we messed them up in the last restoration procedure.

I'm now going to cleanup the orphans a bit and see where we stand

[miltonyorkcastle]

Rock on.

[gilshem ironstone]

Can you use our profile signature as an identifier?

[Script Wrecked]

The signature is added each time the post is displayed, not when its posted; when you change your signature, its changed "everywhere".