So, after all my griping about the thread numbers changing after the vBulletin upgrade, I've been digging in and trying to update my webpages to point to the correct new numbers. Between Priuschat itself and my external stuff I've got over a dozen links that needed to be fixed, and I'm still wading through it. In case anyone else is interested in following up and re-establishing correct linking, here's how I've been going at it. . First, you need the old thread number, which you probably have already from the broken link. It will likely be part of a URL that looks like ...priuschat.com/index.php?showtopic=NNNNN . Danny has kindly pointed me at a useful archive facility in which all of the old database is intact, but readonly and sans pictures. If you access priuschat.com/old_ipb/index.php?showtopic=NNNNN, there is the old thread. From that you can look and determine the author, the board section it was in, and the post date. Example: to find Galaxee's "engine reseal" post, you can use http://priuschat.com/old_ipb/index.php?showtopic=30906 where 30906 is the thread containing the original post and all the followup. [Danny has also fixed things so that non-logged-in visitors can download the Priuschat-hosted pictures, which is very useful to keep us as a Great Internet Resource.] . Armed with the author, topic title, and section, you can either grope around in the new archive tree, accessible via http://priuschat.com/forums/archive/ ... or start a search on the poster's username and one or two keywords from the title. Title-only search is fairly fast and doesn't burden the board too much, even if it's going way back. With a little looking around it's pretty fast to find the new home of the old post, which in the case of our example is the longish URL [somewhat shortened for readability, but note carefully where it points]: http://priuschat.com/forums/pri...on/29957-1g-pri...seal.html and if you follow the link you see the same thread [*with* pix!]. . Now, an interesting thing about the new vBulletin. If all you have is a thread number, you don't need to specify an exact forum section or subject-based title. URL request parsing apparently only looks for some placeholders and then sniffs the number out of it and that's all it cares about when accessing the database. Thus, the above long cumbersome link can be reduced to http://priuschat.com/forums/x/29957-x.html and still work. The required elements seem to be the directory /forums/, some arbitrary placeholder as the next level down (/x/), and the thread number followed by another arbitrary string (-x) and .HTML. That's it. You can drop the short form of the link into another post or page, and Priuschat will issue a redirect to the "correct" page once access is attempted. Most other vB based forum sites work the same way, so you might find this helpful elsewhere too. . The new numbers are always slightly lower than the old ones, and the disparity gap widens somewhat with the recent-ness of the thread. Noting the new thread numbers while you're cruising the new archive tree and comparing to the old one helps narrow down which page of archives you want fairly quickly. Perhaps some day someone will be enterprising enough to figure out exactly which threads were lost in our second annual Great Database Fire. . So if you have old posts that cross-link each other, or external pages that reference specific Priuschat material from the past, it's not that hard to edit and update them to point to the correct new places. I would encourage everyone to search for stuff you authored, and the string "showtopic", which should quickly ferret out any crosslinks you embedded in the past. . _H*
hobbit - thanks for that tutorial. I'm sorry that I haven't been able to get the auto-redirect to work again yet.
And thank you for ferreting out the process. When I have some time in the next few days, I'll sit down and work on mine. Like you've said repeatedly, the links are too valuable a resource for them not to work.
Oh, I should mention that Google and probably the other spiders have picked up a good number of the new links, so if you vaguely remember a topic and a keyword or two that may help in finding some old stuff as well if PC's built-in search engine isn't versatile enough. [and for multiple keywords, so far it isn't -- I haven't found any valid "phrase" syntax to plunk into it yet]. . _H*
Wow! I just spent an hour figuring out if I'm the only one that notices many internal links died. Could PC make this topic sticky or create a FAQ entry on the many many dead links in the archives? I'm new to this forum, so I don't know much of it's history. But I do know I can find a lot of very useful information in the archives. Unforunately, everytime some thread refers to another thread in the old 'index.php?showtopic=NNNN' style, I end up at the main page. Very annoying... Could there be at least an error handler to explain to a newbie like me, what's going on? Now, I'm not really a newbie on the 'net, but even after searching the FAQ and this subforum, I found nothing obvious, not even when clicking through all 5 pages. I must have missed the fact that the solution to my problem was under "Crosslink updates". Stupid me. Would it be possible to add an handler to index.php that recognizes the 'showtopic=' parameter and does something useful to it, like redirecting to the archive with a banner indicating such? Meanwhile, I'll try to find that course on anger management again. I seem to need it! ;-) Keep up the good work, guys! Edit: I just found the archive is 404... AAARGHHH!! Hummmm... Goose-frabaaahhh ... mm... Okay.
