Dukasaur wrote:Thorthoth wrote:Dukasaur wrote:Thorthoth wrote:cocaine and a butt straw?
How about, if you have nothing constructive to say, you don't say anything?
Hi Duk, now that I got your attention, I need to ask you something...
Who deleted the forum threads and why?
It's not my place to go into great detail and reveal confidences. Suffice it to say that with the recent server crash due to lack of available memory, someone with the best intentions decided that CC's best hope of survival was to kill off its most gluttonous memory hog, this forum and some of the others. The action was not authorized by the webmaster and the person has been disciplined, but we are not interested in dragging his name through the mud, as he honestly felt it was our best hope of saving ourselves.
This doesn't get Thorthoth off the hook, however, it does raise a valid point, which is, the webmaster should not be expected to bear the cost of maintaining a vast library of old forum posts for the benefit of a minority of this site's paying customers, if this is a major expense to the site's operation.
I would, again, suggest the best way forward is to externalize the database files to a third-party so they can be archived off-site. As an off-site archive the webmaster would no longer be obligated to pay to maintain them and, simultaneously, they would not divert traffic from conquerclub.com if they were only in a viewable state.
My suggestion of password protecting such an offsite archive, and making its robots file disallow archiving by the Wayback Machine, etc., would also partially resolve the issue of people who might have - at some point in the past - posted personally identifiable information to the archive but (at some point in the future) want to change, amend or obfuscate it, by at least ensuring it wasn't publicly accessible. Alternatively or additionally, they could be restored here for a finite period (i.e. six months) to give people a "last chance" to whitewash posts.
First things first, how big is the database of the OT and GD boards?