vote! Important Poll - Please Participate

[LHookins 3,113]

Tom, I appreciate your post, and understand the problem. No one is scourging Avsim or you. As for acting as if we'll be deprived of something, let me see if I can express what I'm reading in your posts.

 

Before I begin, the word "archive" may mean different things to different people. When I read through your first post quickly, I thought, "Ok, he wants to move posts out of the main forum to an open searchable archive, and I can understand why." I voted "Yeah, do it after 3 years." Then I read some responses that meant the "archives" would not be directly available to the forum members and asked to change my vote. Given the context of some of the posts, I'm not the only person who thought archives would be searchable.

 

So, no matter what you mean to say, no matter what words you are using, this is what I'm reading.

 

"I'm thinking of deleting posts over a certain age. Don't worry, the posts won't be permanently deleted; they can be restored from backup. All you have to do is tell me exactly what you want restored."

 

This is fine and good if I know exactly what I want you to restore, but how am I to know what's available? Do I give you a search criteria and ask you to do the search I'd do, and you'll restore the necessary results? That doesn't sound like a manageable solution to me, and I doubt it does to you either. Will I have to ask for post number 74316, and if so, how will I know to ask for it? If I need to know the experience of people who installed SP2 and then Acceleration some time later, as will happen eventually, what do I ask for? All I remember now is that when Acceleration and SP 2 were new, some functions of SP2 were not in Acceleration, requiring some special handling.

 

I may do an in-depth search of some part of Avsim once or twice a year, reading stuff going back several years, as I've done with CTDs and FSX tips and tricks. If all 100,000 members do the same thing, that's a lot of searching. Even if there are only 5000 members actively doing a search or two every year, it's still a lot of searching.

 

All I'm asking, all anyone is asking, is that you make the archive searchable online without staff intervention. Since you've said you're looking into ways of doing this, that's the best I can hope for. I'm not ragging on you, just trying to make sure you understand.

 

Thanks.

 

Hook

[BartEnder 2]

I would gladly sacrifice searching time for the content available. Tom, You can implement 'not less than x seconds between searches' feature.

I do not remember reading posts older than a two, three years, but there are a lot of FS2004 users, which I bet will find valuable answers in older post rather than opening new topics (thus further increasing the hardware utilization).

[mgh 89]

Archiving is just that. Archiving, as I said. When you go to the Library of Congress (here in the U.S.), and want to view a document from the archives, you ask for the document to be brought out. It is not on the library shelves, so to speak. That might be splitting hairs for some of you, but it certainly is not deleting or removing access entirely.

 

I image that, like other major libraries, the Library of Congress has an extensive cataloguing system to help identify what we want, together with staff who can provide assistance. Also, at present I can use the Avsim search facility myself and spend as long as it takes me to find what I want.

 

I can't see it being feasible for Avsim to provide such levels of service - nor do I expect it to.

[n4gix 4,955]

For whatever it's worth, FS.com has an Archive area with seven forums that're searchable separately from the current active forums.

 

By using this scheme, every thread moved into the Archives remains available for search and/or casual reading, but does not impact the load on their server for active forum searches.

 

Is such a scheme feasible here? If so, it would seem to offer the best option for satisfying everyone...

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

Is such a scheme feasible here? If so, it would seem to offer the best option for satisfying everyone...

Bill, that scheme, or something approaching it, is what we are looking into.

[Dave Morgan 68]

Would it be possible to separate out the older stuff to a different (read-only) server? My biggest lament when AVSIM was hacked was the loss of our historical discussions. Plus, there are still lots of users using FS2004--with our corporate memory on that going back close to 10 years...and there are even some still on FS2002--the history is all they really have to go to now.

 

Cheers

 

This is surely the best suggestion, which Bill has made clearer. I still use Flight Unlimited in my more senior moments and refer occasionally to the older topics. For FU3 'older' can mean anything post-1995...

 

Dump older stuff somewhere else, read-only, to improve performance in the current / contemporary forum but please, please don't make any of that information unavailable to the public. Avsim undoubtedly contains the premier mine of sim information and it would be disastrous to do away with access to it.

 

Further, do you really want to clog the current forum with repetitions of old questions, or your in-box with requests for searches? If access to old information was only by request, Avsim staff would have to conduct a complete search and winnow out what they considered to be relevant. I don't think the public would be in a position to request a specific thread without first knowing what the thread contained... a bit of a paradox.

 

I haven't voted yet, the options still being rather limited, but you may consider me to have done so for an accessible archive of old topics, say 18 months as a default, with some date-specific filtering.

 

Best regards, and many thanks for what you do provide.

Dave

[HiFlyer 9,373]

Well.......

 

Could it be set up that most searches only go back a certain amount of time (say 180 days or so) unless the searcher specifically checks a box requesting a more thorough search? Set the box so that for searches with additional depth, the box has to be checked each time?

[Fielder 3,726]

Nobody likes being told his message is unnecessary because the issue has already been well covered. Archiving reduces recovering the same things over and over.

 

Off topic: The search engine at Avsim is way better than at most forums around the internet!

 

For the other forums (which are not so good) it almost always yields better results when I enter the 'site or domain url' into the search box at 'google advanced search' page.

 

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

[orchestra_nl 957]

I voted No to both questions because I understood that archived posts would be unaccessible. I can understand the need for reducing the load on the servers and Bill's suggestion might be the way to achieve that. I think the majority would like to have the older threads available in some form. As has already been suggested, some kind of option to include older/archived items in a search might be an option. That way, older items might be archived to a (slower) database that is still accessible while the more recent posts (24 months + stickies etc?) are in a different faster database.

 

Cheers,

Allard.

[WarpD 824]

If you archive posts, and they completely disappear... then there are a few forums that will become pretty useless in the long run.

 

All forums that are used for development, such as the aircraft and panel development forum will lose all of the information provided through the years. I don't think that's a good thing.

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

All forums that are used for development, such as the aircraft and panel development forum will lose all of the information provided through the years. I don't think that's a good thing.

 

You are right, and we will not be archiving the forums.