Saved RDF threads - thank you

[Comte de Saint-Germain]

Hi folks,

I have a full copy on one of my servers, ~11gig of fully browsable forum, not sure if I should grab a specific domain to set it up on or put it on an existing domain.

The complete forum is browsable exactly like it is atm. ie: it's a full archive.

So question, do I purchase a domain such as dawkinsforum.org or rdfarchive.org or something? or just throw it up on one of my existing spare domains, something like dawkins.nomasters.org?

You win the prize!

[David M]

Also, RDF has some rights on that collection of posts. They could use legal means to stop public availability.

Unlikely as in the announcement they have explicitly granted users the right to archive "any content they value" not just content that the user has created, this would extend to the right to republish that archived material as long as it is properly attributed as having RD.Net as the original source.

[ED209]

Well, get a torrent up man!

[NineBerry]

Finished downloading all the public stuff. Now only Tech Support and Off Topic is missing. Currently downloading that.

Would like to see what Davo has done

[ED209]

Nineberry you know that if you pull this off, you'll automatically win every future debate on the alleged evils of copyright infringement and digital distribution etc....

[Valden]

Finished downloading all the public stuff. Now only Tech Support and Off Topic is missing. Currently downloading that.

Would like to see what Davo has done

[RPizzle]

Thanks a bunch to everyone taking their time (and bandwidth) to download everything. You guys are a class act.

[Fact-Man]

Hi folks,

I have a full copy on one of my servers, ~11gig of fully browsable forum, not sure if I should grab a specific domain to set it up on or put it on an existing domain.

The complete forum is browsable exactly like it is atm. ie: it's a full archive.

So question, do I purchase a domain such as dawkinsforum.org or rdfarchive.org or something? or just throw it up on one of my existing spare domains, something like dawkins.nomasters.org?

Awesome news!
Careful with the legal stuff though (logo and the likes...), definitely copyrighted!

A logo can be trademarked, but isn't copyright material.

I think all references to RDF that are hard coded in the software should be stripped out of Davos's copy and he should mount a vanilla rendition fronted by a page that describes its origins and the reasons for its mounting in a new domain, e.g., convenience to one-time RDF members, preservation of historically significant material.

Cheers to Davos for doing this!

[Agrippina]

Cheers from me too. Very clever.

[klazmon]

I have a good upload speed, and I'm happy to seed it.

I do know that one kind soul has offered hosting space with massive bandwidth, and another has suggested that a domain may just be available, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the forum can simply be migrated, warts and all, to another platform. I'm sure we have enough technical know-how between us to make it happen.

I wonder though if the software itself was reaching it's limit. I remember reading somewhere that even putting more computers at it the forum would slow down. Perhaps phpBB has it's limits?

Possibly, although I know of at least one other php board with a similar membership, at nearly 50,000, although the content is just shy of 1 million posts, as opposed to just over 2 million. In any event, it could work with a proper archiving system, with the oldest content relegated to a searchable archive. There are technical hurdles to overcome, but they are far from insurmountable.

I wonder about this. The ubuntu forums have well over a million registered users and there are often twenty to thirty thousand connected at once. They have full search and I haven't seen any performance problems on that site. True they use a commercial forum software called vBulletin but as far as I can tell it is still written in PHP and using a backend MySQL database. In any case 11GB isn't that large as databases go. The whole thing can be cached in RAM on even a low end server.

[ginckgo]

Are they seriously going to create a blank slate at RD.net?

Man all those hyper-informative posts by Cali et al. I must have them! aaaaaaaaaaaa

[Agrippina]

Are they seriously going to create a blank slate at RD.net?

Man all those hyper-informative posts by Cali et al. I must have them! aaaaaaaaaaaa

Damn and I'd only just started doing a list of some of the funniest things people had said, so it's only a short list, I could start a new thread with those and then you can add some of your choice ones to it. And we could build from there, I have no doubt the trolls and sock puppets will arrive, they usually do.

[eXcommunicate]

I think all references to RDF that are hard coded in the software should be stripped out of Davos's copy and he should mount a vanilla rendition fronted by a page that describes its origins and the reasons for its mounting in a new domain, e.g., convenience to one-time RDF members, preservation of historically significant material.

I think our monumental "debates" in Spring/Summer 2008 over Clinton vs. Obama qualify! teehee

[lpetrich]

I've saved a few threads that I've posted in and collected the Political Compass scores, but the horrid search engine won't find all of my posts for me.

Since more than one person here is saving threads en masse, I suggest that we coordinate our actions and create lists of all the threads and posts that we had succeeded in saving. Not by hand, of course, but by writing programs that can walk the directories, and read and parse the files.

I've had some experience with doing similar sort of things with saved messageboard posts, though on a much smaller scale.

What one might do is make a giant list of forum ID's, thread ID's, and post ID's, like:
f <id>
t <id>
p <id>

for thread <id> in forum <id> and post <id> in thread <id>. The posts could have other identifying info, like username, date, etc., and the threads and forums their names. Once we get these humongous lists, it's possible to compare them and find out who has what.

I like to write in Python and run my programs off of the command line; I run AppleBSD a.k.a. NextStep a.k.a. MacOS X. I don't know how easy it might be in Windows to run on the command line something like

python (program) (args)


Finally, I have a lot of experience with vBulletin. It's payware ($195/license), it is written in PHP, and it uses a MySQL database to store its data. I've also seen vBulletin run with huge databases, like in IIDB, now FRDB -- about 6 gigabytes. vBulletin users have also written oodles of add-ons for it, like custom-BBCode tables and plugins that do the work of various template edits.

[HughMcB]

To ALL,

Please read thread...

http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=9279