Forum Topic Pruning: SOS needs your help

[John Willett]

Does that mean our post counts will all be reduced and we'll all lose our Jedi status and be busted back to the ranks?



CC

Well - this is what happened last time - I had 10,000 posts deleted the last time.

I was the very first person on the forum to reach 10,000 posts

Then they re-did the forum and my total of over 14,000 posts was reduced to only 4,000

[Hugh Robjohns]

Think of it as an incentive, John, to post helpful things...

My declared post count is currently over 26.6k...

[BillB]

Hi, I dug back through a few of my old posts, which are interesting to me, but probably not so important for posterity. Does anybody have any suggestions for personally saving threads that may be lost? The only one that occurs to me is to print to PDF, but there may be more elegant solutions. Thoughts, please?

Actually, on review, I have nothing before 1 Jan 2012, but I would still like to save a few threads ahead of potential future pruning, so the questions stands.

[Forum Admin]

Hi, I dug back through a few of my old posts, which are interesting to me, but probably not so important for posterity.

Bill, I would still elect them for moving into UIA forum as a safety backup - it's not like there will be tens of thousands needing to do this (I hope).

Does anybody have any suggestions for personally saving threads that may be lost? The only one that occurs to me is to print to PDF, but there may be more elegant solutions. Thoughts, please?

The Forum has its own Print View but I just tested it and it only works for the current 'page' so you'd have to do multiple prints for multi-page topics. It adds &view=print to the end of the URL.

Example: https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/view ... view=print

[BillB]

Thank you, both good suggestions

[John Willett]

Think of it as an incentive, John, to post helpful things...

My declared post count is currently over 26.6k...

7,000 now - back to half of what I originally had.

But I post helpful things all the time - in areas that I have the expertise.

[BJG145]

The SOS Forum currently has 616,472 Posts and 57,317 Topics. Regrettably, we need to reduce its Post Count by approximately one-third, circa 200,000...We need to action this initial pruning as soon as possible and propose to cull the oldest Topics/Posts on one or two forums at a time to reduce the massive server overhead

Couldn't you just archive the Word Association thread instead?

[fatbenelton]

It's a great shame - though I understand the very real reasons. There is a ton of info from the past that may be incredibly useful. Generally, it's probably really niche specialist stuff from the past that may be useful. Eg 99.9% aren;t interested in Atari Notator, Opcode Vision etc etc anymore, but the groovy hipster setting up a retro set up may need info that will be lost forever.

I'm sure you've explored this but was apaid archive considered? A bit like specialist archives in libraries, we could perhaps have 2/3 years on the 'public' forum with a 'Pro SoundonSound Archive' that is the Alexandria LIbrary of Music Tech wisdom. Accessible for day visits for those doing some arcane research (£2/day?) or annual subs - £10/year? Perhaps it can be included with digital subscriptions etc.

[CS70]

Without any intention of be a know it all (because of course I am not privy with the details): from a purely technical standpoint, have you considered checking the technical details with someone?

Because 616.472 posts and 57.317 topics is not that much amount of data at all. Even assuming a hefty 100K for each post (which I seriously doubt), the grand total would be.. 61 Gb. The forum does not host memory consuming data such as images or video, so that would hundred kilobytes of basically only text - an enormous amount of writing.. Even considering UTF-16, so maybe 2 bytes per character, 50K of text is perhaps the equivalent of one SOS issue's worth of text - for every single post . So the actual db is likely much smaller. Or did u mean 616 million posts?

It's actually (with no disrespect) laughably small in data bases terms.

Even ten times that amount shouldn't impact performance in absolutely anything, so long things are designed in a minimally ok way.

The main bottleneck to data processing performance nowadays is generally network bandwidth between collaborating machines... but then we are talking petabytes of data - hundreds of thousands of millions etc of SOS forums - with concurrent access from hundreds of thousands of users.

The cost of a small review (perhaps paid only if the review yield actionable results) could well be much lower than pruning the forum and creating and maintaining a proper auto-prune mechanism.

As a forum user, anything that works for you guys works for me - SOS forum is one of the best free resources of the internet so you're always right. So let's just say I have put on here my old hat of consultant - for once, at no cost

[ConcertinaChap]

Of course there's the Internet Wayback Machine as a possible way to retrieve a page if you know what you're looking for.

Couldn't you just archive the Word Association thread instead?

Fair point.

CC

[Martin Walker]

Couldn't you just archive the Word Association thread instead?

Fair point.

I've already had a request from a regular forum user not to prune that one

Martin

[Forum Admin]

Of course there's the Internet Wayback Machine as a possible way to retrieve a page if you know what you're looking for.

Just checked and indeed the superb Wayback Machine does appear to have archived the old website's Forum posts, as this example demonstrates:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150403153000/http://www.soundonsound.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=516806&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1#516806

I've had a rummage to see if it keeps an archive of the current SOS website's Forum -- and indeed, it does!

https://web.archive.org/web/20200502123830/https://www.soundonsound.com/forum

Wayback obviously crawls our site frequently and grabs "captures" of it. Here's the Wayback link to the existing Forum, so one must assume the Forum posts it has archived will never go away and are frozen in the sands of time?

If so, everyone has access to them as long as Wayback Archive stays around.

[Forum Admin]

Couldn't you just archive the Word Association thread instead?

I have made the WA topic a 'sticky' so it will not get pruned. However, at some point I will have to go back in and split it up into a few locked read-only topics to reduce the burden on the server of its current 1,168 pages. But that can wait a while yet...

[John Willett]

Couldn't you just archive the Word Association thread instead?

Fair point.

I've already had a request from a regular forum user not to prune that one

Martin

Maybe we could just delete the existing thread and start a new Word Association Thread with the last post of the old thread as the first of the new one.

How many people read old posts in that thread? It is just making it go forward that we want.

[Sam Spoons]

I'd agree with that.

[BJG145]

I've had a rummage to see if it keeps an archive of the current SOS website's Forum -- and indeed, it does!

https://web.archive.org/web/20200502123830/https://www.soundonsound.com/forum

Maybe...although if you start clicking through to topics, pages and threads, the links seem to break.

[jimjazzdad]

Probably not helpful in the current context, but how the heck does Gearslutz - whoops! I mean the site that must not be named - manage it? According to their site, they have 1,050,284 threads with 12,579,207 posts. And I have never noticed any 'pruning'.

[Forum Admin]

Probably not helpful in the current context, but how the heck does Gearslutz - whoops! I mean the site that must not be named - manage it? According to their site, they have 1,050,284 threads with 12,579,207 posts. And I have never noticed any 'pruning'.

Different beasts -- GS is purely a forum. SOS is an entire, very large site with many strings to its bow.

[John Egan]

You guys know what SoS can afford to store, but it seems to me that the topics below are the "SoS Core" topics :

Recording: Gear & Techniques
Music Theory, Songwriting & Composition
Mixing, Mastering & Post Production
Live Sound & Performance
SOS Support Forum

so my suggestion would be to prune these as lightly as possible, commensurate with the need to reduce the storage burden. Obviously other topics would then be subject to greater pruning.

Regards, John

[ManFromGlass]

OK I take back my post, Martin. Prune away at WA. I’ll count on the SOS hive mind to continue with witty and some downright funny associations!
Am I asking too much??

[Martin Walker]

OK I take back my post, Martin. Prune away at WA. I’ll count on the SOS hive mind to continue with witty and some downright funny associations!
Am I asking too much??

No you're not asking too much - I'm sure the hive mind will continue to keep this thread alive.

If we honestly thought that anyone would wade through all 1171 pages of this thread it might be worth keeping it all, but I seriously doubt that this will happen

It might be worth hanging on to the most recent few months, but not every word since October 2012

Martin

[Folderol]

Couldn't you just archive the Word Association thread instead?

Fair point.

I've already had a request from a regular forum user not to prune that one

Martin

Maybe we could just delete the existing thread and start a new Word Association Thread with the last post of the old thread as the first of the new one.

How many people read old posts in that thread? It is just making it go forward that we want.

Laugh if you like, but if I'm feeling a bit MEH two topics I do have a browse through are the word association one and the make up a lie one. Between them they brighten me up no end.

[Drew Stephenson]

But it would give us the opportunity to make all the same old jokes again.

[zenguitar]

But it would give us the opportunity to make all the same old jokes again.

Whilst neatly side-stepping plagiarism accusations.

Andy

[Dave B]

Whilst I understand the need for the pruning, do we need to do that on the User Reviews forum? I would have thought that this was an area with almost no duplication and worthy of saving for posterity..