Hi all,
I've been working hard to restore all of my review threads affected by the recent outage. At this point in time, I think I can safely say that just about everything that can be recovered has been (or at least, as far as I plan to :sweat
.
To explain, the content of my reviews was never in question - I keep backups of all of my review posts. In fact, I am now converting these to HTML and posting them on a new site that I have registered: www.flashlightreviews.ca.
My intention is to have this site serve as a online backup of all my reviews, for times when CPF may be down. At the end of each review, you will find a link to the CPF discussion thread.
You can also continue to find my master list of CPF reviews (direct links to CPF) at: http://www.sliderule.ca/flashlight.htm.
Thanks to all of tandem's work on restoring the RSS feeds, my initial review posts were all captured. :thumbsup: All I had to do was go and update the content of each post with my updated review text.
The recovery of Nov 2010-to present posts in my threads has been the main issue. I spent the time CPF was down scouring for all the cache data from Google, Bing and Yahoo for my review threads (using all the tricks I could think of, and those posted here since CPF went back up). Even with tandem's excellent DejaVu tool, this has been a non-trivial task to recover.
To put it in perspective, I posted ~25 threads in the outage period - all of which had discussion thread posts to recover (anywhere from 10 to 150+ posts, depending on the review). I was able to capture virtually all that data - I think only 2 reviews were left partially recovered (mainly the most active ones, because there were multiple pages of posts and I couldn't find cache data for all of them).
In addition, another ~20-25 review threads posted in the ~6 months preceding the outage period had active discussion activity during Nov 2010 to present. Again, I was able to recover almost all the lost posts for those reviews as well, with a few minor gaps.
Going back further in time, it was harder to find cache data (but fewer reviews were active). I have tracked down at least partial cache data for another ~15-20 or so earlier reviews that were particularly active. I'm afraid I've found all that I am likely to at this point. I have focused here on tracking down comments for lights that are still available in some form for sale (I have posted >200 light reviews in my time!).
Adding that all up, I have recovered somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 cache pages from over 65 of my review threads, totaling some 1300-1500 individual user posts. Tandem's DejaVu tool was invaluable to me for this, :bow: although I did decide to make my life difficult by quoting each of these posts individually. I figured that would be the clearest way to distinguish other users posts from my own, but it meant a LOT of cutting and pasting.
With the recovery work done, I will now get back to creating new reviews.
On a personal note, a few observations struck me while I was recovering all the this data from the search engines. The first is how many of my reviews have been pirated on other discussion fora and websites. :shakehead Not cool seeing others passing off your work as their own. :thumbsdow
But the main thing that struck me is how positive and supportive the members here have been of my work. The reviews are a LOT of work, and I have always appreciated seeing the kind words from CPFers in my threads. But going through so many posts in such a short period of time, the volume of supportive remarks was overwhelming. I am touched by how much my work is appreciated here, and I would like to say a heartfelt "thank you" to each and everyone of you who have taken the time to say so. If there was a :humbled: icon here, I would use it!
And now, I am happy to say my review posts are back in business!
I've been working hard to restore all of my review threads affected by the recent outage. At this point in time, I think I can safely say that just about everything that can be recovered has been (or at least, as far as I plan to :sweat
.To explain, the content of my reviews was never in question - I keep backups of all of my review posts. In fact, I am now converting these to HTML and posting them on a new site that I have registered: www.flashlightreviews.ca.
My intention is to have this site serve as a online backup of all my reviews, for times when CPF may be down. At the end of each review, you will find a link to the CPF discussion thread.
You can also continue to find my master list of CPF reviews (direct links to CPF) at: http://www.sliderule.ca/flashlight.htm.
Thanks to all of tandem's work on restoring the RSS feeds, my initial review posts were all captured. :thumbsup: All I had to do was go and update the content of each post with my updated review text.
The recovery of Nov 2010-to present posts in my threads has been the main issue. I spent the time CPF was down scouring for all the cache data from Google, Bing and Yahoo for my review threads (using all the tricks I could think of, and those posted here since CPF went back up). Even with tandem's excellent DejaVu tool, this has been a non-trivial task to recover.
To put it in perspective, I posted ~25 threads in the outage period - all of which had discussion thread posts to recover (anywhere from 10 to 150+ posts, depending on the review
). I was able to capture virtually all that data - I think only 2 reviews were left partially recovered (mainly the most active ones, because there were multiple pages of posts and I couldn't find cache data for all of them).In addition, another ~20-25 review threads posted in the ~6 months preceding the outage period had active discussion activity during Nov 2010 to present. Again, I was able to recover almost all the lost posts for those reviews as well, with a few minor gaps.
Going back further in time, it was harder to find cache data (but fewer reviews were active). I have tracked down at least partial cache data for another ~15-20 or so earlier reviews that were particularly active. I'm afraid I've found all that I am likely to at this point. I have focused here on tracking down comments for lights that are still available in some form for sale (I have posted >200 light reviews in my time!).
Adding that all up, I have recovered somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 cache pages from over 65 of my review threads, totaling some 1300-1500 individual user posts.
Tandem's DejaVu tool was invaluable to me for this, :bow: although I did decide to make my life difficult by quoting each of these posts individually. I figured that would be the clearest way to distinguish other users posts from my own, but it meant a LOT of cutting and pasting.With the recovery work done, I will now get back to creating new reviews.
On a personal note, a few observations struck me while I was recovering all the this data from the search engines. The first is how many of my reviews have been pirated on other discussion fora and websites. :shakehead Not cool seeing others passing off your work as their own. :thumbsdow
But the main thing that struck me is how positive and supportive the members here have been of my work. The reviews are a LOT of work, and I have always appreciated seeing the kind words from CPFers in my threads. But going through so many posts in such a short period of time, the volume of supportive remarks was overwhelming. I am touched by how much my work is appreciated here, and I would like to say a heartfelt "thank you" to each and everyone of you who have taken the time to say so. If there was a :humbled: icon here, I would use it!
And now, I am happy to say my review posts are back in business!
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