Old Board Contents

[keith]

Before the old board disappears into the ether are there any plans to preserve its contents. I find it a valuable resource and feel it would be a shame if this collected wisdom were lost.

Keith

[David]

Any volunteers?

[keith]

Yes - thats why I posed the question!

If I can get the data, and its in a format that I can process, then I should be able to create a new, read only, web site to search for topics and display threads.

We would need somewhere to host the web site however.

As an alternative to a web site I could create a program and database that people could download to their PC's. They could then look at the old board contents offline.

I'm not sure if there would be any copyright issues.

Keith

[Phil Nottingham]

It could be a good idea - however the search facility is a bit primitive. Its not that great on this one either judging by the number of repeated questions that are generated?

As to copyright surely by posting on this and the old board without claiming copyright then its foregone? If not I hereby claim it and likewise advise that I owe no liability to anyone for anything I have ever said or will say and anyone acting on my comments does so entirely at their own risk!!!

Any lawyers out there?

[keith]

The project is under way!

Last night I used a web crawler to get all of the data from the old board onto my PC. I now have about 6,500 html pages sitting on my hard disk.

The next step is to work out what each file contains and how they relate to the threads on the old board. Once thats done I shall write a program to extract data into a more easily usable form.

I'll keep you all posted on progress.

Keith

[glennr]

Well done Keith. Good luck. Many thanks in anticipation. I think it's an excellent idea. ;D

[RichardF]

Hear, Hear! Greatly appreciated.

RichardF
Southampton