We really need the old forum back...

[Gufcam]

Gentle Chasecam moderators,

I think (as many others I suppose) that we really need to have back online the backup old forum also!!
For example I have returned at home today and I had to do some changes in my setup I would liked to check some infos that I remembered were in the forum about my PDR-100 and I noticed this "bad" news...all is gone...
I understand that you want to change the look and so on but now we have lost all the useful posts that we have do during the last years.It's totally unacceptable!
I think that also the new users that want to buy your equipments would like to consult the old archive with a lot of useful info/tips/suggestions and so on collected during years and solution for many answers they could have.

Please add a section on this new forum for consulting the old closed forum also.I don't want to think that you don't want to support your customers...

many thanks

[RandyChase]

Sorry, but it was not that simple. If it was, I would have. I have tried to bring over the posts, but without success. My plan now is to copy and paste manually the important posts.

[stuckthrottle]

Randy,
A very basic understanding of the mysql schema will enable to you import most if not all of the old forum back. It's almost as simple as cut and paste in excel.
Let me know if I can help. Many of us relied on much of the information from the old forum.

Victor Fabian

[Gufcam]

Many thanks for your replies,

now I really hope that the old database of posts could be retrieved from the old forum so we can have back all the posts and everyone can find again the useful informations that are stored in that posts.

[smoseley]

stuck,

Hi, I developed the new chasecam site. It definitely wasn't as simple as cut and paste. We did a dump of the old db, but vBulletin changed their schema pretty significantly between the old version and the current version, so we had to manually go in and figure out which of the columns in the 100 or so tables were necessary, and rewrite all of the imports for the necessary data to be imported. After a significant amount of hours, I lost all my work due to a computer error, and at that point, Randy decided just to launch without the old data.

Now that the new forum is up and running, going back to reimport the old posts would be even more complex, because you would have overlapping identities on most, if not all of the tables. Furthermore, there is probably an overlap on usernames and/or emails of registered members, which would cause unique index issues. We could simply truncate all of the data, but the new forum was tied into the e-Commerce software to make a more seamless use of the website (one login for everything), and we can't drop all of those users without losing the associated sale data.

:(

[stuckthrottle]

understood.
I appreciate your reply. Here's a minor suggestion since we've run across a similar issue on another site. Using one of the many backups from the previous version you probably have, relaunch another forum for reference use only, not allowing posting. It could be named something like ../forum2 or whatever. It should only take a few minutes to do, much less than you guys sifting through old threads to try and bring back information that was previously posted.
I'm not trying to be a pain, just trying to help so I too can refer to some of the old info in those precious threads.

[jdog109socal]

Why not just make new post on your issues...Im sure they will get answered


Jdog

[fast_ian]

Why not just make new post on your issues...Im sure they will get answered

No doubt. However, I'm sure you've scanned forums and turned up, eg, answers to questions you didn't even know you had..... There was some great stuff in there - It does seem a shame to "lose" it (IMHO).

However, of even more concern to me is what appears to be some pretty messed up indexing - Even after logging in (which in itself requires a page reload) the "home" page doesn't reflect the lastest posts - At least for me - Is anyone else seeing this? [It kind of makes it a PITA to just "scan" the home page for new posts.....]

As always, just my 02c,
Cheers,
Ian

[stuckthrottle]

No doubt. However, I'm sure you've scanned forums and turned up, eg, answers to questions you didn't even know you had..... There was some great stuff in there - It does seem a shame to "lose" it (IMHO).

However, of even more concern to me is what appears to be some pretty messed up indexing - Even after logging in (which in itself requires a page reload) the "home" page doesn't reflect the lastest posts - At least for me - Is anyone else seeing this? [It kind of makes it a PITA to just "scan" the home page for new posts.....]

As always, just my 02c,
Cheers,
Ian

<---same problem. I find that after logging in I still have to hit refresh. That sometimes works.

[admin]

Yep. In the middle of all the other things we need to work on and get done, we have found there is an odd forum issue we have tried to fix. And so far, not successfully. Apologies for the hassle.