On January 1st (or shortly thereafter) we'll be freezing the boards here, as we're moving all our message board activity from this third-party system to one that's entirely within our own website, at www.thomhartmann.com.

If there are posts or threads here you'd like to continue, feel free to copy and paste the essence of them into the new board by way of starting a new thread over there.

Once this board is frozen as read-only, we'll keep it up as an archive for at least a few months so people can find and relocate or save off things they may want from here.

Thom

Perhaps an increase in the number of moderators might help also; I know of one community that is about one third in size compared to this one, that has 8 moderators. Needless to say, it's a nice place to hang out

Thom, once it is "frozen" will it still have the quote (modify) function or will that cease also?

The reason I ask is that cutting and copying will not capture the URL script and thus will not facilitate such a "move".

As always, thanks for setting up and maintaining this forum for us.

I've never done this before with this Groupee software, but would guess that when it goes read-only nothing will be able to be modified. You may have to re-create hot-links if you want them.

Our new host, by the way, is 100% solar-powered. A zero-carbon footprint!

Thom

Cool.

I am going to feel tremendously better knowing that my hobby is going to be Carbon Neutral on your end. Hopefully, that will inspire me to stop using Coal to power my computer on this end. I have been looking into the alternative energy source of little children on hamster wheels. Still working out the bugs.

Can I be a moderator? PLLLEEEASSSSEEE!!!!!

Is there any way to download the database?

quote:

Originally posted by ArtJunky:
Is there any way to download the database?

Good question? And how big a file is it anyway?
I am assuming it is only a HTML file/text. Without any graphics.

I nominate Loganthor...

quote:

And how big a file is it anyway?

269.6 MB.

We're still investigating. No promises though; these things are often not straightforward, as I know from professional experience. It would be best to assume it won't happen.

quote:

Originally posted by Gnarlodious:
I nominate Loganthor...

For what?
What about me anyway? What am I not your friend???

I have been trying some things to save to the content here and it seems that nearly 8000 posts, I have no way of saving except a small portion...

Which means that this is a non-mutual divorce for some people here.

We have had purges before but this is a drastic one. So how can we save what we had for at least posterity?

quote:

Originally posted by Sue N:

quote:

And how big a file is it anyway?

269.6 MB.

We're still investigating. No promises though; these things are often not straightforward, as I know from professional experience. It would be best to assume it won't happen.

Thanks for answering that. In what format is it in? File format? What software can read it?

Well if it won't happen then we definitely will be disappointed. And I assume that we all would like to find another alternative.

What if someone or group hosted it instead?

It's in MySQL so far as I can tell. There doesn't seem to be a lot of experience out there of exporting databases from this host to others, so we're having to feel our way. I certainly would hate to see us leave the old messages behind.

MySQL is extremely flexible. You can make commands to extract all posts by some username, or any other data field.

I log in to the MySQL server every week at http://LiberalTalkRadio.com/ and delete scripted user accounts with no emails. There are several hundred per week. It's fast and you don't even go through a browser. I also back up the entire database to two other servers weekly. You do all this from Terminal through SSH.

It's mostly a matter of how well one schema maps to the other, and how well documented it is, how clean the data is, and stuff like that, rather than what flavour of database.

A simple thing like apostrophes in names (e.g. O'Henry) or the two systems using different character code sets has been known to add considerably to the amount of work involved in porting databases, for example.

The is in the detail.

Hello Sue,

Well, this is going to be a big problem for me also. I have nearly 4,000 posts and even an index of threads. The last transfer wasn't too big of a problem since all my old posts and threads were move over to this board. However, the old transferred posts had coding embedded and made it difficult to edit.

Anyway, will our old threads (I am speaking only of threads created under a person's name and not every individual post) be moved over to the new location?

Could individual requests be made for those of us that want to transfer and preserve our old threads under our names?

Can we request our old account threads to be sent to us as a backed up text file archive...even for a fee?

I have spent a lot of time writing and thinking about my posts for the last 3.3 years. Those posts I especially invested time in are already in my personal archive, but I could not preserve the entire dialog.

I'd be willing to work on it. Some people have invested a lot of work on material on these boards, and I think it's important to have some archived posts.

Hello Thom, Sue,

Thank you for the notice and thanks for the space to present my voice over the past few years.

Wishing you, and forum friends, happy holidays and all the best in the new year.

Peace,

Lisa

quote:

Similarly, in human terms, edges are places of great activity. Be they the front lines in battle, the point of customer and vendor interaction in business, or the places of disagreement and difference between individuals, cultures, or nations, edges are dynamic, alive, and inherently unstable.
Societies without edges become stagnant....
I've always been a risk-taker, a "Hunter" as I use the term in my books on ADD. As a child and a teenager it got me into considerable trouble, but it also led me into situations where I learned things that have been of considerable value to me all my life.

Thom Hartmann, The PROPHET'S WAY, P.213

Thanks to you Thom and all that have ever showed up here. All have been my teachers and I'm grateful.
I look forward to the change and continued evolution of the message board.

Thanks folks.

I'm not sure how much progress will be made over the holiday season, so I'll get back to you when I find out more.

One of the advantages of the new thomhartmann.com is that people can comment directly on the show, Thom's blogs, transcripts etc. And with that and the message boards under the same roof, there should be more interaction on the message boards with new people who might never have got as far as the message boards in the past.

Bamboo - thanks for the kind words...

quote:

e people have invested a lot of work on material on these boards, and I think it's important

Gnarl and others,

I do web design and database work for a living so if there's something I can do, let me know. However, I mostly work with windows/SQL and ASP so working in php or mysql isn't as natural to me. Perhaps there's something I could do.

I've been here since 2003 so I have an interest in making sure this material isn't lost. I've downloaded most of the threads I'm interested in but it would be nice to capture these threads and perhaps post it somewhere.

Just created a new account on the new message board.

Where do I start? I'm so disappointed.
I like the new site but the message boards...

Can't hide user information...it's all out there for everyone to see.

Email address is visible
Name Visible. Basically, any right-winger and a loose screw and a gun can find me without the slightest problem.

The obvious is the fact that the ENTIRE history of our conversations are going to be zeroed out and we'll have to have all those arguments all over again as though NOTHING ever came before.

No indication who is new and who has been a devoted contributor. We'll have nowhere to point all those one-post tyros that come along with their one-liners.

I don't know, perhaps it's a good time to leave all this blogging behind.

Hang in there, please, ArtJunky. It is early days yet.

Thanks for the feedback and SQL offer. I'[ll bring it to the attention of the people over there.

Your email address should only be visible to you.

Sorry, Just a moment of frustration.

What is the rough plan? Timeline?