RECOVERING OLD FORUM POSTS...

[davesmith_au]

How to pull up all of Google Cache's pages on a particular search term ...

To grab all posts on the old Thunderbolts Forum by user davesmith_au, I would enter the following command into Google:

"davesmith_au" history site:www.thunderbolts.info/forum

Then click "Cached".

Anyone can do this, and recover any of their threads which are still cached at Google. Of course there's still a bit of work involved in transferring the data from saved html files, but all in all it would be well worth it. Obviously, you can also recover anyone else's stuff too, just substitute their old username for yours, and away you go. Particularly I think MGmirkin and dz should retrieve their stuff if they can, and help rebuild some of the lost knowledge. There were of course lots of other users with very informative posts too, but I'm particularly peeved at having lost all of the great resource links Michael used to post, and also dz and Plasmatic's 'garage' experimentation.

Come to think of it, I don't think it will take that long to rebuild a good deal of the important stuff, once people get the hang of it. And I know it's been said elsewhere, but rest assured, there are regular back-ups scheduled, including backing up off-site, in case of any further dramas . So if the unthinkable were to happen again, we will have all but the most recent posts to rebuild with. Too good.

And thanks to pln2bz for passing on this invaluable advice...

Onward and upward friends!

Cheers, Dave Smith.

[pln2bz]

I've been able to recover the following threads from Google's Cache:

History of the Z Pinch and Theta Pinch Rewritten! (complete)
Electric Theory, Maxwells Formula, Tesla Scalar Vortex (all but the last page)

I was only able to save a handful of the Comet Holmes thread. That appears to be toast. The "EU and criticism" thread appears to be available, but I've yet to save all of it. There are many others that are very worthwhile. To locate your own old forum pages in Google cache (before they are flushed), you'd want to enter something like this in Google's search:

"text search string" history site:www.thunderbolts.info/forum

"text search string" might be a username or thread title or whatever. Then click "Cached" and save the page as html onto your machine.

I recommend that people save their favorite threads for now and we'll figure out what to do with them later. It may be possible to strip out all of the unnecessary formatting in these html pages with an html editor.

[junglelord]

Thats good to hear. I spent so many hours on trying to assemble information on numerous threads. Its nice to see those two may have made it through the black hole.

[StefanR]

With combined effort a lot can be saved, I got whole pages of holmes and have about 10 pages off google hits on my account name.
After work I will try to make some effort too.

[bboyer]

Very heartening to see the regrouping. What a great community!

[MGmirkin]

But is there some way we could perhaps get a central cache repository going, so that whoever managed to snag a few pages can dump them somewhere and we can try to rebuild a few threads?

Threads I'd like to see saved (among others):
Planetary Science - Electric IO
Planetary Science - Of Plasma Torus(es), Lightning and the Sun.
Planetary Science - Waterspouts, Landspouts and dust devils, oh my!
Electric Universe - Sun-theories through a new looking glass.
Human Question - The Body Electric
Resources - Electric Universe Papers (Peer Reviewed and otherwise) [I've gotten P1 of this thread, not sure about the rest.]

Umm, gosh, what other good threads were there? So many to choose from, methinks.

May have to act quickly, in case Google goes to refresh pages in its cache and overwrites old threads with 404-not found pages.

~Michael Gmirkin

[MGmirkin]

I've snagged a few pages from a few threads. But it seems to be hit or miss...

I'm generally formatting the output files to capture which page of a thread was saved. Such as ElectricUniversePapers(P1).htm etc.

Might suggest others do the same. As it seems to be that only one page at a time is cached in Google, I think? And we might want to try to compile them at some point?

Again, don't know if we'll want to copy verbatim, or simply summarize some of the info contained therein for further discussion going forward? Or, I don't know if we want to simply try to establish some kind of "static archive" somewhere? (Big project, but may be worthwhile?)

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin

[MGmirkin]

I'm still tempted to say that when rebuilding we should perhaps try to summarize the important points and leave out some of the less important chaff / fluff conversations (I've seen several while trying to save as many bits and pieces of threads as Google has cached)...

~Michael Gmirkin

[MGmirkin]

Actually, I've just now found that it works much better to leave out the word history when doing searches... Seems to return more complete results?

IE, try typing the following into google:

"electric universe papers" history site:http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/

then

"electric universe papers" site:http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/

The latter returns both pages of the intended thread, whereas the former only returns 2 links, one of which isn't related to the thread I wanted to get to.

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin

[paravolt]

What if you made a front page topic "Recovered Forum Posts" and that would be the place to put this material.

[davesmith_au]

Great job everyone, this is wonderful to watch. Old threads seem to be being rebuilt before my eyes.

A couple of pointers to the rebuilders.

1.) PLEASE be thoughtful of what you resurrect, how you present it, and where you put it. Try to identify the best forum for it to go on, AND include "RECOVERED" in the title, especially when starting new threads off.

2.) Whilst we want as much of the good stuff back as we can get, PLEASE avoid anything which is of dubious relevance to EU, especially on all but the bottom two forums. And even there, some relevance is still required.

3.) Have fun!! - And thanks for the efforts.

Cheers, Dave Smith.

[MGmirkin]

Google is very frustrating sometimes!

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Apparently, if you access too many pages, Google thinks you're a virus or automated script and blocks your access!? Augh!

Apparently, a group effort is required. And, again, paging through the various threads cached, there seems to be a lot of chaff (useless conversation) interspersed with the gems. So, I don't know that we necessarily want to put everything back word-for-word, so much as pertinent summaries, or poignant links / quotes.

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin

[MGmirkin]

I've found that in trying to track down individual pages, entering a couple keywords from the title does not always work. However, if you can get it to regularly return the first couple records matching the right thread, it's easy to also get specific pages to come up.

For instance, where

"crt discharge patterns" site:http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum

came up with a list of thread pages that was incomplete (on the first page of results; I can't view subsequent pages 'cause Google is treating me like a web-crawling virus or automatic script)

"crt discharge patterns" "page 5" site:http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum

came up with that specific page out of the thread. IE, it searched for the exact term "crt discharge patterns" (which was fairly unique) and ALSO "page 5," thus page 5 of that thread was just about the only result it showed.

Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin

[MGmirkin]

So, I'm slightly working on archiving SOME of the old forum from google's cache. Frankly I'm trying to skip over most of the fluff and go for threads I thought were particularly good / informative.

Still discussing how best to implement relisting some of the info. Will perhaps let folks know how it's going once something more concrete is nailed down and the project is a bit further along. Right now I'm still just trying to FIND half the old forum, as it were.

~Michael Gmirkin

[StefanR]

Again, don't know if we'll want to copy verbatim, or simply summarize some of the info contained therein for further discussion going forward? Or, I don't know if we want to simply try to establish some kind of "static archive" somewhere? (Big project, but may be worthwhile?)

I think it depends on the size of the thread.
But I started with the tensegrity structures in the Human Question (finished now), which had two pages, so I copied that post by post.
But threads as Cymnatics, Holmes, CRT-experiments which were huge threads. I not sure.
I think I will start with the Holmes thread now.

About the static archive, I was rthinking in the same direction but maybe it would be something after the major recoveries.
But adding all important information by subject in one thread can be very helpful for quick referencing.
So much to do. So much to do.