Hmm, sad that many people use those image storing services and some are causing problems now. Reason why I prefer to pay for a hosting that also host the photos. Guys, Michelle is working on the old DB and she is doing great improvements!
There was a plugin for Firefox that would let you see the old photos but the link quit working. They really did destroy the forums when they changed to a pay structure. Sometimes if you search and hit the image button you can see the old photos on Google...
So far, I've written a simple piece of browsing code that allows post browsing and pulls back images from the site wherever possible. However, it isn't perfect. Hugo - I emailed you a copy of the code so far, plus the PDF's I managed to pull out. This weekend, I hope to introduce code to link to files that were uploaded against posts. I also took a brief look at the video uploads this morning, but I think I'm going to have to rely on people's browsers to play media.
I wonder how many websites Photobucket broke when they started charging for picture sharing ? Back when Ebay charged extra for having more than one photo I used AOL Pictures and wrote my listings in HTML. That service got taken over by some firm that didn't allow sharing. I switched to Photobucket. Luckily Ebay were allowing twelve pictures by the time Photobucket started charging. This is partially what the expression "Digital Dark Age" was invented for. However, it surprises me how many old Stereo2Go pictures and even complete pages seem to have been cached by Google etc.
In some cases, the page itself (ie. the html code) is the only thing cached and they still reference the image... so the images might actually still be there, somewhere, and available to be referenced. That may have changed and they might have started caching the images, but that might land them in too much legal hot water I think. Then again, with the lawyers they can afford, and the rights to scan books above what any other company can do...
I'm sure you guys know about the internet wayback machine....Here's a page from 2006, I can't get to some of the first pages, there's a compatibility issue with my browsers. Also some of the threads don't work, something about sites with passwords even though you didn't need one to read the forum back then. https://web.archive.org/web/20060204182126/http://stereo2go.com:80/6/ubb.x
The Wayback machine stores the html code for what comes back from the servers. In the case of Stereo2Go, the images come from a number of places. Some were stored on the site, some were stored on photobucket, and others were stored on a variety of other services. Some links were to YouTube, while some videos were stored on the web site. There are also a few other small services out there which still have some of the videos. So yes, the wayback machine, where it does have the posts, will end up with some images displaying. If you right click and view the image in a new tab, then you'll see the actual location of the file in the URL. - incidentally, the emoticons probably still resolve
Regarding the "sites with passwords" side of things, some require that you're logged in to boards to get access to some areas. Still as a regular user, but nevertheless logged in. Depends on the security settings. They also interact with the site, because ... standard stationary HTML is easy enough. You ask for the page, and the server gives it to you. In the case of forums, it's a different kettle of fish. When you ask for a page, the web server actually has to start a program, and that program goes off and queries a number of databases... basically it builds the page on the fly, so to start with, you're not dealing with a stationary page... but to add to that, some page generation is dependent on information hung over from previous pages. Here's some of the get and post methods... and some of these methods don't show any information in the URL, so you don't see the information being passed -http://jkorpela.fi/forms/methods.html This "hang over" will happen during normal browsing behaviour... but the kind of crawling engines like Google, Web Archive and many others, don't browse the site like a human, so they end up asking for pages which are out of sequence and don't carry the information necessary for the forum engine to create the pages properly... so the dynamic generation fails, and the web crawler doesn't get a valid response for the URL. ..and obviously there's more to it than the simple bit I've put here.
You're welcome. I'm not able to do much, just adjust some code for the images and file, and make it browseable. There is an issue with downloading files and videos, because the old forum engine stored them under its own naming structure... but I'm still working on that. I also want to try and make the thing searchable, but parsing text while still protecting against SQL injection techniques isn't easy. I might have to limit it to single word searches. That stuff is going to take time, but I envisage at least having a browseable structure in place, at some point soon.
The old site had already many problems regarding photos especially as the threads were getting older. There was a strange problem when a photo was not only missing but at the same time replaced with another totally irrelevant, I recall a nice walkman that was replaced with the photo of a very old Greek banknote ! Nevertheless still very important database. Thanks Michelle for your efforts, very much appreciated.
Ha ha. The old site quoted an entire reply and that was a pain when it was a long post or included some photos. Thanks that this new one automatically collapses it. Great idea.
Yes... er.. that was not intentional. There were a very few posts where people used this, "view attachment" feature... and I just wasn't able to follow the numbers... and as they were quoted anyway, I didn't think it was that much of a loss. The database contains nearly 200 tables. I did what I could to get the main posts out.
