I’m sure you’ve seen the notice about the boards migrating to a new system soon.
From TMF "the currently active boards will have posts from this year migrated to the new platform … The current platform will be up until at least the end of October so folks can grab anything they want to keep… They are also looking at creating a read-only archive of all history…"
So, given that “looking at” is pretty speculative phrasing, one should assume for now that all board content more than a year old is disappearing next month.
I would further conservatively assume that the datahelper search engine will break.
Jim
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Generally when they do this it’s at least in part a cost-cutting measure aimed at a non-revenue-generating service, and the convenience of their users does not factor in at all (Yahoo deleted its entire Groups system including the archives, not long ago). Deep links into old posts will likely fail and the continued existence of the old posts themselves is highly suspect.
Generally when they do this it’s at least in part a cost-cutting measure aimed at a non-revenue-generating service
For sure. I can see their point–it’s a business.
Posts on public boards can create liability, but can’t create revenue, so what’s the point?
It’s even an argument against keeping the old messages which, though essentially free to host, would still potentially create liability somehow.
However, that view is still consistent with (say) letting someone crawl the old content to archive it.
A person could ask.