D Day+1: Triage

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Well, it would appear that my pleading, cajoling, and ranting notwithstanding, there won't be any rollbacks, and we're stuck with major migration issues from the old forum. My apologies to those who might have been offended by my strident tone. But the situation was (and still is) alarming, and I felt it imperative to make as forceful a plea for rollback as possible, before it was too late. Now it's probably too late.

But that was yesterday; this is today. And we need to move forward. This doesn't mean that I'm not still seething a bit about the botched migration of the old forum. That will take some time to get over. I can only hope that someone at Parallax will come to realize what a critical asset the old forum is and that a seamless, fully functional migration of the old posts to new forum is essential to preserving the forum's immense value.

So, in the sprit of, "Well, the oil has already leaked; let's start cleaning it up," I've created a website where people can go to repair their posts until a wholesale (and correct) remigration can be performed. It works like this:

1. Go to my webpage at www.phipi.com/postfix/.
2. In a separate tab, go to the old forum at forums.parallaxinc.com and find a post which, in the new forum got clobbered.
3. Copy its address to the clipboard. My webpage will show you how.
4. Go back to my webpage, and paste the copied address in the box provided.
5. Click "FIX ME!"
6. When the results appear, select everything below the dotted line, and copy it to the clipboard.
7. Find the same post in the new forum.
8. Click the "Edit" button for that post.
9. Click "Go Advanced".
10. Click in the edit box, then type Ctrl-A, followed by Ctrl-V. This will replace the botched post with a new (hopefully not botched) version.
11. IMPORTANT: Click "Preview Changes" to make sure it's what you want. Be sure to test your links!
12. When you're satisfied with it, click "Save Changes".

Now the fine print: All images, links, and attachments that originally pointed to the old forum will now point to the "new" old forum at forums.parallaxinc.com, instead of their migrated (and possibly corrupt) copies. This means that for this to work over the long term, the "new" old forum must remain extant over the same long term. If a clean, wholsale remigration of the old posts cannot be made, it is incumbent upon Parallax to make sure that this happens.

DISCLAIMER: No guarantees. Use at your own risk! That's what the "Preview Changes" button is for!

Anyway, give it a try. If you have any problems with it, please report them here, and I will try to fix them as time permits.

Special note to Jim Ewald: The Perl script that performs the fix is really doing things the hard way, since the HTML from the old posts gets parsed and reverse engineered to produce BB code for the new forum. It would probably be much easier to extract more structured data from the dotNetBB database and translate from there. Nevertheless, if you think something like this might be helpful for performing a cleaner remigration, please let me know, and I'll try to help.

-Phil

Addendum: Oh, I forgot to mention: code blocks in the repaired posts default to the "Parallax" font, assuming that font is installed on your PC (which it will be if you use the Propeller). Otherwise, it's good ol' Courier.

trodoss

@Phil,
You might also want to mention that posters should check their attachments on old posts, especially if they were larger than 63KB in size. I have run into this on nearly all of my old code/source postings. There is a lot of code that is *not* in the OBEX that *is* posted on the forum that may end up being lost.

--trodoss

ElectricAye

Thanks, Phil,

it's a great relief that you've put this together. I use the forum like a library, which prevents me from pestering the heck out of everyone with my often trivial questions. But, sooner or later, I'm sure Parallax will find a permanent fix for these things.

thanks,
Mark