Electronic Punk

In early January, the NTFS database was irreparably damaged. The threads and users table were no longer accesible.

The Legacy forums are our attempt (several of us have taken part in this project) restore what we can of those forums. The threads and users tables were rebuilt using existing data from the posts table up to a state where all the old threads were recovered and placed in one forum. Users were restored, but they can never be used again as they do not contain a valid e-mail address and the passwords were not saved - it would ahve taken far too long to try and get 26000 users worth of data.

The users table was rebuilt by taking everyone who had ever posted and re-adding them, as such this came down to around 8000 users. Because there was no threads table, it was not possible to tell in which sections posts were made. So they have all been put into one forum.

This forum is now available to the public, but keep in mind that for the time being it will play hell with your current cookie settings and may well log you out of both the osnn site and forums:

http://www.osnn.net/forum/legacy/

The next stage of the project is in discussion:

We want to reassign all the users who have resigned up to the OSNN forums and were also members of the NTFS forums, so that the legacy forums reflect their new username.

Once this is done something very cool will happen!

Jelsoft, the makers of these forums, are working on a script to merge two vb3 forums. When this is released, and we are at the stage of legacy mentioned above - we can bring back the old posts into a new forum and over a long period of time, restore them to their original section!!!

Users who have not resigned up to OSNN will have their status downed to guest and their posts will reflect this, this also menas that if you have changed your username in any way that you must let me know below (this means at ANY time) or you posts will not be reassigned to you and thus your post count will not be reincreased.

There is no time frame to when this stage will take place, but it will obviously not be before Jelsoft have releaed their importer update.

One change I have already made on the legacy forums is that "dealer" has now become "perris" to represent his new name here.

Lets hope we can do this as it would be ****ing cool.

Small note: Do not try signing into the legacy forums, or even registering as it just isn't gonna happen!

Thanks.

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Jewelzz

Well done EP and everyone who worked on getting the old forums up for people to view

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Xie

Define "this means at ANY time". I had my username changed prior to the db crash of NTFS am I still effected?

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o0RaidR0o

I'm so sorry that the original db was damaged. I realize that you are putting forth an herculean effort into restoring the old db and I commend you on it.

On a selfish note, I am still using my old nick and pw, and if i'm reading your post correctly once the old db is tabulated I might get my old standing back.

I'm a bit jaded at being referenced as a beginner

Henyman

great to see the results i know a lot of people have been involved in trawling through the posts

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funky dredd

Good job to all who were involved!

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Electronic Punk

Xie (and anyone else for that matter):

Let me know about any forum names you have used at any time.

Basically the user table was recreated by using the name of anyone that ever posted a erm, post. I don't know if these details will have been updated when a) the username was changed or b) when the various counters were updated (every now and then)

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Electronic Punk

It was X-istence who did most of the work recreating the database and perhaps: Geffy, Speedy_B and Mdsalih (honestly can't remember )

All I could do was to try and suggest methods to which we could build various rows.

On another note, we may also be able to change the join date of those rebuilt users, by changing it to the time of their first post. We will have to see tho! All depends how things go!!

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Xie

EP my username was " XP'd " on ex-perience that became NTFS and then once I became active on NTFS I had it changed to Xie

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NetRyder

Excellent job, EP and everyone else who was involved. It's so great to see all the old posts still intact!

About the old usernames: wanted to let you know that my posts show up under the name XPMagic in there, while subsequent posts by other people say things like "Thanks NetRyder"
Sort of confusing.

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rushm001

Excellent job to all concerned!

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Electronic Punk

Netryder: There are prob 2 members, one called Netryder and one called XPMagic.
VB3 can merge those.

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Glaanieboy

*sigh* The very last post before the crash:

Henyman

it was all there fault

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Khayman

All that time we spent moving threads to the right forums wasted!
(Read in tone of Buzz Lightyear )

Theres a lot of threads that got recreated after the crash but will be slightly different, what about those?

Oh and we should call it "NTFS Reloaded"

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Electronic Punk

Yeah, Khay, I decided to merge em all back into one section... that way when we do reimport them, we can reimport them all into one forum. A pain in the ass, but not a complete was of time, as it did give us the chance to remove a few posts that weren't to be seen by the public

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muzikool

Wow, unbelievable job to everyone involved! It will be great to be able to reference some of the info that was in those posts. Thanks guys!

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Khayman

Ahh, all those posts about <edited> and how they used to <edited> with <edited> and <edited>. Shame really cause they where total <edited>

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perris

what a great job, incredible work everybody responsible

I'd like to suggest we rename legasy to "xp-erience, ntfs legasy"

for this, maybe we'll get some people looking for their lost home to be able to find us with a google search

perris

also, for the members doing a search on legasy, try "list as posts" when doing a search on that board, that'll probably give better results to thumb through