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Restoring Barbelith's history...

13:26 / 28.11.03

Ok - now this is a really really weird suggestion, that I'm not sure people will be interested in. I've been thinking of ways in which we might bring back some of the Barbelith history that was lost in various ways through the many reboots that happened before we moved over to the Cal-based system we've been using for two / three years.

There's a repository of old threads from when we were the nexus here: here.

What I'm thinking is that it would be interesting if we could try and bring some of those threads over to the new system, but to be honest I'm beginning to think that the only way to do that would be manually inserting them into the database one post at a time...

Now that's not a quick job, so I was thinking - if people were interested, maybe we could try and distribute the work around, with people volunteering to reformat one thread according to guidelines that I can then insert into the database (again manually - ick).

I don't know exactly how long and difficult a process it might be or whether it's even really that practical, but it could be a good contribution to the board's reconstruction of its history...

Essentially what this would involve is a plain text document which was formatted roughly like this (with each thing on each line JUST THE DATA, NO EXPLANATION):

[The number of the forum you think the thread should go into]
[The Title of the Thread]
[Date/Time of first post as expressed in Unix Time]

And then for each post:
[The number of the forum the post goes into]
[The user name of the person who posted it - not their number, just their name initially]
[Date/Time of the post as expressed in Unix Time]
[The content of the post itself]

You can convert normal time to UNIX time here:
http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm

So, what do you think? It's far from the most interesting job in the world. If you're interested, volunteer by choosing the thread you'd like to convert (use the first post date / last post date as a marker) in the thread below, and then chuck the finished product to tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org whenever you've got the time...

13:45 / 28.11.03

...before we moved over to the Cal-based system we've been using for two / three years.

I have a mental image of Cal's brain physically wired to a web server. Not that that's so far from the truth...

Our Lady of The Two Towers

14:09 / 28.11.03

The most obvious question is 'why?'. Do we really suffer from not having the original 'fence-sitting scum' thread and such like?

14:13 / 28.11.03

Lady, it's history.

I am your keyboard monkey bitch.

04-10-99 18-12-99

for starters. I'm out and about for a couple of days, then I'll do the above as a trial run, then some more, hopefully.

Jack The Bodiless

15:37 / 28.11.03

Jesus. Just clicked that link and found one of my first posts in the Nexus, and the only one I remember really well. Four years ago today.

Co-inky-dink...

15:41 / 28.11.03

Well hopefully people can choose the ones they think are worth transferring over and that means that we'll only have lost the crappy stuff.

15:41 / 28.11.03

In fact I'd like that, as it would save me work and maximise rewards!

17:53 / 28.11.03

I'd like to find some old threads posted by the Ubermisfit name, which I think is Post-Nexus/early-barbelith.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

10:49 / 29.11.03

The thing is, I've looked at the page that Tom's linked to, and it's mostly the fluffier end of the related fora, 'is Kevin Smith invisible', 'Bye Rex', 'Moore vs. Morrison'. By all means bung a link in the wiki, but I'm not actually sure there's much of a need for cut'n'pasting of this stuff into the current Underground. Can anyone find the old Nexus using the Wayback machine?

13:26 / 29.11.03

It's still not there - you just get the snafu message from when everything went tits up. You can get access to a couple of old threads from the first version of the UBB Underground by chucking the old URL in (which, if memory serves, was http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi ), but nothing significant. A couple of Core threads and that's about it.

When we shifted over to the red/grey Underground, a few people said that they had a lot of content stored from those original UltimateBB days, but nobody followed it up. Don't suppose anyone can remember who it was?

18:52 / 30.11.03

I'd definitely be willing to help if this project happened. As someone who never was on the Nexus, it's great to look back on these threads and see some stuff from when The Invisibles was coming out. Is there an archive other than the one you linked to, or is that it?

And, it's great to see a time when people still seemed to be really wowed, and care a lot about The Invisibles, rather than trying to downplay its impact. I completed my first read a year ago, and it completely changed the way I thought, so I really relate to posts like "My return to Invisibleness," and some others. Sometimes, it's better to like something unironically, rather than to disparage it just because it's ceased to be new and cool.