Disappearing Thread

[Van Rijn]

You say you can't find either in the search...
Did you look at the link I provided (the 69717)? I understand it doesn't have the later posts, but It is from 2005 and it's first post is by you.

The similar names are confusing, which is why I'm including the thread numbers, but "69717-Post-your-dinner" was started on Jan 29, 2008, last post was Feb 24, 2010. The missing "33976-Post-your-dinner!" was started on Oct. 22, 2005 and had a post at least as of May 15, 2012. There are a couple of posts after that listed as posted "today" in the cache, so would have to be some date later than May 15. Presumably the thread was deleted sometime after May 15, this year.

[grapes]

OK, sorry, I mis-interpreted the discussion about thread merge. I too recall posting to the dinner thread more recently.

The archive seems to go from OTB3999 thread#33972 to OTB4000 thread#33979

[slang]

Looks like restoring a thread is a LOT of work, even if you can get it right... very recent vBulletin support forum thread

[crosscountry]

It looks to me like the "33976-Post-your-dinner!" thread was completely deleted.

And I'm still wondering what happened.

[TheOncomingStorm]

Darn I was going to use some of those recipes if I ever moved out.

[NEOWatcher]

And I'm still wondering what happened.

At the risk of turning this into a non-space conspiracy thread...
Fraser probably deleted the thread so there's no evidence leading to his new cookbook.

[Solfe]

NASA hacked the server and stole the recipes for a new fund raising book.

[Frog march]

the forum ate the thread.

[Jeff Root]

Restoring individual posts, individual threads, and
individual sub-fora *should* be a standard operation.
After more than twenty years of online forum software
development there's no excuse for it not being a
standard proceedure.

If somebody pays to have the forum run from a "cloud",
then whoever operates the cloud should provide a backup
service that can restore anything that has been in the
system long enough to be backed up. (An hour?) If they
can't do that, what good are they? Why are they being
paid? What are they doing?

Why do I not see any credit given for the cloud owner?
Does the lack of credit mean that they don't take any
pride in their work? They don't have any ownership in
their work? They don't take any responsibility for it?

Please make sure Fraser sees this.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

[HenrikOlsen]

You're assuming the backup is record level rather than file level.

[grapes]

You're assuming the backup is record level rather than file level.

You mean, if we restored from backup (a month ago?) that all posts since would be gone--and we'd have to shuffle them back in?

"Funny" story, that once cost us/me a potentially hundreds thou contract when someone at the customer would do that, deny it, and blame it on us.

[HenrikOlsen]

Basically the backup would have to be restored to a parallel database, than the records can be pulled out of that and reinserted in the regular one.

[ToSeek]

I've read the description of what it takes to restore an individual thread under vBulletin, and it would take a truly awesome vanished thread for me to even consider asking Fraser to go through what's involved.

I would like to know just how we made the thread disappear, though. That's an annoying mystery.

[slang]

I would like to know just how we made the thread disappear, though. That's an annoying mystery.

One possibility might be that it got merged with another thread. I tried searching for recent text found in a google cache copy of the vanished thread, but didn't find anything. Of course I don't have access to every place where a thread might be.

[crosscountry]

I've read the description of what it takes to restore an individual thread under vBulletin, and it would take a truly awesome vanished thread for me to even consider asking Fraser to go through what's involved.

I would like to know just how we made the thread disappear, though. That's an annoying mystery.

I would like to know as well. My thread wasn't important as you say, but I looked forward to reading it when I signed on. If my thread can disappear, so can others. And if others start disappearing, then there may be reasons to figure it out now. I hope this wasn't some sort of practice attack.

One possibility might be that it got merged with another thread. I tried searching for recent text found in a google cache copy of the vanished thread, but didn't find anything. Of course I don't have access to every place where a thread might be.

In recent weeks I had posted about salads made from my garden. After doing a search for "salad" by crosscountry there were no results.

[ToSeek]

I would like to know as well. My thread wasn't important as you say, but I looked forward to reading it when I signed on. If my thread can disappear, so can others. And if others start disappearing, then there may be reasons to figure it out now. I hope this wasn't some sort of practice attack.

Well, without forensic evidence, it's kind of hard to tell. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the most likely possibility is that a moderator got a little careless and marked it for deletion along with a bunch of spam threads (which we see, but you don't). Typically, when I get on BAUT in the morning there are half-a-dozen new threads in OTB that the forum software has held in limbo because they match the indicators for spam that we've previously set up. There's a box on the right of each one to tick off, then you go down to the bottom and select "Delete threads as spam". A couple of confirmation steps, and they're gone. Particularly when there's a bunch of them (as there often are), it wouldn't be that hard to tick a valid thread by mistake. But I'm hoping that this thread has alerted the moderators to that possibility, and they'll be more careful in future.

[Moose]

Pretty sure that couldn't have happened, ToSeek, at least not using the thread-level anti-spam tool the mods use. Had a newbie started the thread and been within the first 50 posts, it could have been a plausible scenario, but as it stands, Cross-country would have been marked banned (a pretty strong tip-off of what happened when someone noticed), and there would have been a prominent warning about his 50+ posts, again, a pretty big tip-off.

[slang]

Perhaps it's simply a database issue, maybe fixable by an index rebuild or whatever tool is available at hosting. And if not that.. perhaps someone with database access might find something, but that would be time consuming.

[Swift]

I suspect it is a conspiracy among the Food Network, the Illuminati, and the aliens from Ceti Alpha XXIX, who didn't want us to share recipes.

[Frog march]

Or perhaps there was secret communication between alien agents, and the FBI shut it down.

I had pasta last night=meet you in New York at the usual place. I have important information

quiche and onion gravy=agent 2085 needs more hypno drugs

etc..

[NEOWatcher]

It was probably banned when people started posting recipes from "how to serve man".

[ToSeek]

Pretty sure that couldn't have happened, ToSeek, at least not using the thread-level anti-spam tool the mods use. Had a newbie started the thread and been within the first 50 posts, it could have been a plausible scenario, but as it stands, Cross-country would have been marked banned (a pretty strong tip-off of what happened when someone noticed), and there would have been a prominent warning about his 50+ posts, again, a pretty big tip-off.

Yes, I'd have to agree after I did a trial run on an old thread in the Removed Threads forum. It's not as easy to get rid of a thread as I thought it might be.

[crosscountry]

I guess there is no hope for the thread. How many others must die before we do something?

[Selfsim]

Is it my imagination, or did the 'Sagan's Law' thread from the CT forum just disappear, also?

Cheers

[antoniseb]

Is it my imagination, or did the 'Sagan's Law' thread from the CT forum just disappear, also?

Habitable Moons thread is also gone. Investigating.


Post Edit: oldonius was accidentally removed as a spammer. He has been reinstated, but the thread in question is unrecoverable.

[EDG]

Habitable Moons thread is also gone. Investigating.

Post Edit: oldonius was accidentally removed as a spammer. He has been reinstated, but the thread in question is unrecoverable.

Oh, I am very peeved by that.

I spent a rather long time writing a lengthy post on that thread that pretty much contained all the reasons I could think of for why habitable moons might be rare - I'd answered that question a few times elsewhere and thought that was pretty much the best version of the answer that I'd written yet. I was going to go back and turn that into a post on my science blog since I thought I did a pretty good job in explaining that (because heck, nobody's going to remove a post about habitable moons, right?)... and when I went back to copy/paste my post, I find it's gone because some admin got overly twitchy about spammers? (IIRC the OP was also accused by a mod or admin of copying a website, which actually turned out to be his own blog).

Serious Admin fail there. Not impressed at all. Next time please be more careful!

If anyone made a copy of that post then please let me know! (It's not on the google cache, unfortunately).

[antoniseb]

... Serious Admin fail there. Not impressed at all. Next time please be more careful! ...

Admin or mod. It could have been any of us. This incident is clearing up some matters of procedure, and so being more careful IS happening. At the moment, new spam-members outnumber new real-members about a hundred to one, and the spam removal duty is making some moderators question whether it is worth their time to do the job at all (it is unpaid after all, and is generally done out of love of discussing astronomy).

We don't know exactly how we're going to handle this, but it will probably be a little harder to be a new member soon.

[EDG]

Surely there must be effective anti-spam plugins for vBulletin out there. I use phpbb3 on my board, and I found a mod that's been successfully blocking almost all spammers for months now. I've had maybe one or two spammer registrations in total over the past 6 months or so, and I had them on a daily basis before that.

A simple Q&A mod has proven the most effective on my board - you just have to ask a question that requires a human reader to copy and paste something from the question itself (not something like "what is the odd man out in this list" or "what is the fourth planet of the solar system", but something more like "what is the fifth word of this sentence?"). I've found Captcha to be completely useless, and only makes things harder for humans to get in.

see e.g.: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/we...sion-Forum.htm

You don't want to make it harder to become a new member though - obstacles will keep legitimate users away (I tried blocking all free emails - hotmail, yahoo, etc - once, and membership uptake became really slow after that. Once I figured out the antispam and removed that obstacle, it picked up again).

[Infinity Watcher]

Hi all, I don't post often but a possibility occurs to me is that it might be possible to split the spam load a bit, I'm not entirely familiar with the VBulletin software (though I've fiddled with PhPBB once or twice) but would it be possible to create a "spam moderator class" with access only to the list of awaiting moderation threads and the ability to yay or nay them but without other moderation powers?

This would allow a broader recruitment of people to handle the Spam issue thus reducing the load on any one person and freeing up the full Mods to handle the actual board moderation without potentially handing out full mod powers to too large a group.

I think it would depend on how VBulletin handles the permissions issue and I honestly have no idea whether this is possible but I throw it out as an idea.

[tusenfem]

A captcha system has now been turned on asking a question before registring is possible to reduce the number of new-spam-members.