Bummed Out that photos are gone.

[butlersrangers]

Past contributions, that countless members made to this Forum, are negated by the loss of the accompanying photographs.

If I provided any help or useful content, it is gone now.

I don't see a way to help repair what is lost.

Information

Warning: This is a relatively older thread This discussion is older than 360 days. Some information contained in it may no longer be current.

[USGI]

I just searched and found 22 pages showing posts that you've made - you're right about "attached" pics that are missing. These went back to at least 2014. I thought at first you were talking about Photobucket or other sites where they were hosted and lost. I'm going to check to see if mine are gone, too! - Bob

Yes, mine are gone too, and I see that others are working on the problem. Some of my posts are showing an "attachment" number where the picture should be and in others nothing is shown at all where the pictures were.

[ssgross]

I had an idea...what about the wayback machine?
Wayback Machine
There are plenty of times when milsurps was crawled for archiving. There is one from Dec. 7 before the blackout. But, it looks like only the menu of threads in each forum/subforum was archived, not the contents of individual threads.

interesting read about some forums backed up from the wayback and see not. https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2507846

Then, I went searching for some parts/marking references in google...milsuprs often turns up first if searching for images. Sure enough, google found what I was looking for, and for a moment I forgot what happened and started clicking images which took me to threads where the image was missing . But at least we know that google has all our attachements cached. If there is a way to access their data, an eager developer could write some scripts to crawl through threads and cross reference google's cache. We would still not have our full resolution attachments, but at least we might have thumbnails.

[usabaker]

hat countless members made to this Forum, are negated by the loss of the accompanying photographs.

How is this information negated? There is enough tribal knowledge on this forum that any pictures lost can be replaced and even updated. I think that if someone asked about a post that is missing pictures, that post could be restricted or re-created from the text in the original message and photos from others if the originals can no longer be had from the original poster.

Just My 2Cents on the matter

[Patrick Chadwick]

Nearly 5000 contributions with hundreds of pictures - all of them now vanished into a digital black hole - I have no intention of trying to recreate it all.

"... if someone asked about a post that is missing pictures, that post could be ... re-created from the text in the original message..."

That's about it for me: "Re-creation on request" - OK.

BTW, have any of you tried looking at the Photo Gallery today - I can't see anything there either !

[72 usmc]

For the record I am a SRF ( Surplusrifleforum.org) member and also member here, but rarely post. I generally save/ transfer significant posts I find of reference quality over to SRF. I add a link to the post, but then I post the interesting information as a quote, or series of quotes, on SRF in case the link does not work or goes down from other forums. I am not a computer guy. I am an ancient old guy. No computer skills.
I have some comments that might help.

First someone at the VIP level, an old timer of Milsurps that knows the ins & outs of this milsurps forum needs to write a history of the forum, and a few how tos like posting a photo, editorting a post, photo size requirements, saving a post and on and on.... in one general massive sticky. I could not find this.

As some may know SRF had a rocky road. Here is a link to the a general sticky I wrote about things, history, questions on SRF as an example, a stream of thoughts as problems came up on that forum: (nothing great, but helpful to the SRF members) Recover old board posts? - Surplus Rifle Forum - www.surplusrifleforum.org

Now, maybe some ideas about the Wayback Machine Archive.
I save SRF posts I authored that might be considered a general reference or interesting post, I save some posts from other forums. Generally, I transfer the other forum's link and best info. to SRF as a second record then save that SRF post. In addition, I would save the other forums main post. Two saves.
On the Wayback Archive I save posts by the url link I see at the top of my computer. Someone has to save a post to the Wayback for it to be archived. I save each post one by one. To my small brain there is no other way to save an entire forum at one time. Some save the first page as an index, but each heading and all of its individual post are not saved. What works for SRF forum is the process outlined in my above link in the section "How to save posts on the wayback" While it works on SRF, it may or may not work on Milsurps?

For example, on SRF I save a post using the page 1 URL, I would take this URL and paste it into the " save page now box" and hit save. This saves only the first page of the post on the Wayback Machine Archive. If the post to be saved has for example 3 pages, he or she has to save all 3 pages. Next, the author needs to go to page 2 , copy its URL and then paste this again into the Wayback machine's " save page now box" and hit save button and then page 2 is saved. If there are 3 pages to a Post, you need to go to page 3 and copy its URL and then paste this again into the Wayback machine's " save page now box" and hit save button. It takes 3 times to save the entire post. Saving page one does not save the entire post, each page must be saved separately. Anyone can save a forum post. The big question is, did anyone actually save it?

Now some computer wizard person may know better, faster ways. That is not me.
The above process saves a single total post. Now, why are not most posts saved? Few use the wayback archive- someone must save a post for it to be there and to find the post it is best to have the old former URL-- not a title. At SRF we have a problem because of changes over time, first we were Surplusrifle.com, then Surplusrifleforum.com, now Surplusrifleforum.org. There are three different URL sets to get to information. One must know the correct URL during the history of SRF to search for a possible saved post.
This caused some unique problems because as URL addresses change, old links did not work. A posted link to information on Milsurps with the .com URL is blank, but it will be active if you change a link from .com to.org and you can see an old post that was posted in some other forum by an outdated link.... Not really a concern here.

I am more concerned that members may be able to find their old photos on a Wayback Machine saved as a Milsurp post. I will have to play around and see if a Milsurp post could be saved from Milsurps- I am not sure. Maybe the active ads prevent saving stuff to the Wayback machine? Like I said this is just food for thought because I do comment much on this forum. Like others, I find the Milsurp Library as an incredible resource and link to it and have made hard copies of some of the great information.

I cannot believe some milsurps members did not save some significant posts so the photos remain intact. If you read the SRF link you can see the crazy stuff that happened to photo bucket photos on the archive, and photos saved directly to a forum's method of saving photos not posted through a secondary photo host. I will not get into this . The mods may not like this post or find it useless. I am just trying to inform what works on another forum. It may help some here or at least provide some ideas.

So back on track, if you are an author looking for a significant reference post you wrote and are missing photos posted by the forum method, not a secondary photo host, DID YOU SAVE YOUR POST ON THE WAYBACK ARCHIVE? NO, bad news. Unless some member took the time and pain to save each page it's not present , not saved , out of luck GONE...
I assume you saved a PDF copy on your desk top computer ? No, bad move. I assume you saved a master file on your computer of each post's photos as a back up? No, bad move. Now you are out of luck. But we are learning from our mistakes. Did you make a paper hard copy your post in color to at least known what photos are missing , take a photo of the hard copy photo, or reset up the same photo of the item and retake the photo? No, then its GONE.

Do you know the URL of the post you are looking for? Use it to search for the post, it may shown up on the Wayback archive, but not saved by the author or any reader.
You paste the URL into the top browse bar and then hit the BROWSE button.
A link to the Wayback Machine Archive
Internet Archive: Wayback Machine

I am going to play around and see what works on this forum... there may be more info I can provide... maybe this rambling may help?

If members find the old post with photos intact on the Wayback, it is best to provide the direct Wayback Machine Archive URL link and post in into the original post so others know where the photos can be viewed. On SRF only the actual author can add or update his or her post's photos. I assume the same is true here. I have updated old posts, either the author is dead or gone by adding the old photos as new posts which makes for an odd post. I also add the Wayback machine URL link so they can read what was saved. This is an example where I added missing photos not as an author:
VISUAL REFERENCE GUIDE - Rifle No5 Mk1 Fazakerley - Surplus Rifle Forum - www.surplusrifleforum.org

[usabaker]

At some point, if no one carries the torch forward all of the information on this forum will be lost to time once Badger is unable to manage the site any longer.

[72 usmc]

A final thought, like the loss of all Photo Bucket photos from the Wayback Machine Archive, something most thought would not occur. It appears secondary host photos can be removed everywhere if the account is not paid for to maintain. It is possible Milsurps photos were stored on a secondary host and the links broken and the photos vanished both on the forum and the wayback machine; similar to the SRF photos --all the free photobuckket photos were gone when they switched to "Pay to Play". I have no clue if this occurred. I will search out some old posts and see if I can locate some with intact photos over the next few days...

Yes we are lucky to have Badger, each forum has only one or two Greats that maintain and pay for it. So many have gone into space....
Always make a paper copy of information you value as reference.

[Patrick Chadwick]

Let this be a lesson to all of us: „Put not Thy Trust in 3rd. Party Storage“.

I am modern enough to use USB sticks for archiving, rather than DVDs, or CDs, or floppies (!). But I am old-fashioned enough that I do not trust a single device. So when I make a backup, I take a fresh stick, keeping the previous one. The one that is 2-backup-cycles old can then be overwritten.

This precaution is tiresome, and I have everything (well, most of it) duplicated and triplicated. About 30 GB of info, books, and photos that would be largely irreplaceable if lost, since in many cases the original sources are no longer in existence.

But I would rather have a pic saved 3 times over than lost completely once!

[Mk VII]

Even paid-for storage doesn't guarantee they wont disappear, these days. Lot of my stuff went up in smoke with fototime.