Capitol Hill Blue Forums Hot Topics & Breaking News The RoundTable Downsizing ReaderRant

While our history is important it has become expensive baggage. I think ideally we need to transform into something Doug's server can handle.

We could spare a few decades of snide political comment. To survive we need to streamline, modernize, downsize and outsource. We need to change our overall data footprint before it drives us to extinction.

We need to change.

Perhaps into something we'd be proud to invite our friends to...even friends we sometimes disagree with.

Discuss...?

Absolutely. Thanks for the idea.

Doug

Can we please just archive the historic stuff instead of deleting it?
Believe it or not I happen to have about 140 TB of extra storage, in the form of a bunch of bookshelves chock full of idled hard drives representing most of my
work over a forty year period.
I'm SURE I could dig up at least 8 terabytes to spare.

Yes, not joking, I digitized something like 2500 analog videotapes and used as little compression as possible, burned out THREE used Sony U-matic VTR's
in the process. Used to be you could get a decent used one for under fifty bucks, now they are going back up in price again because
the old professional analog video decks are becoming rare...so if I ever want to do more, I'll have to drag a broken machine in for repairs instead.

How many terabytes IS the entire CHB-RR post database?
I can't imagine it being much more than 4 terabytes, am I wrong?

Jeffery, I'm all in favor of archiving if possible, though I can't imagine anyone would ever have any use for old political rants.

My goal is to keep us online with as little fuss and expense as possible.

Most of the work is going to fall on Doug's shoulders. He's a busy man and I don't want to ask too much of him.

As with all things I prefer to look to the future rather than live in the past.

Topping our current list of "popular topics" is Martha's book thread. She's been dead for over ten years and no one has used that forum for years. Looking over the forums I see that one hasn't had an entry since 2013.

It's time to shuffle sh*t around and create a new board that serves our needs and stays within our limited budget.

I disagree on a couple of things...sorry.
One of the problems with the board as it is now is that it's very difficult to search the archives but the main thing is, I disagree that "no one has any use for old political rants", because
in many cases, they are not rants.
I value just about every single word ever uttered here.
We have enjoyed some of the wisest political minds in this place, and I say that based on a rather vast amount of experience elsewhere.
It's not that I think EVERYTHING written here is gold, but let's just say that the ORE is dense and rich, and should be preserved for the day when refining that ore becomes easier.

In other words, I cannot imagine just throwing away nearly thirty years of conversations, much of which is incredibly valuable.
Maybe there hasn't been an entry on Martha's book page since 2013 because everything that needed to be said was said already.
The last entry in the "Trump's Trumpet" thread was by Golem on Tuesday Nov 08 2016 at 11:58 AM and that thread has enjoyed 3,690,499 views.

All I am asking for is a chance to ARCHIVE that stuff...it doesn't HAVE to be directly accessible here, but archives can be linked to.
And I will cheerfully donate a large hard drive for that purpose.

I'm glad you at least agree that we CAN preserve in some way.
For me, the big question is: What is the total size of the entire message database altogether?

I think that old newspapers should be archived too. But that doesn't mean paying rent to store moldering old newsprint.

If you've got available storage and would be willing to become our official archivist then you can try to work out the details with Doug.

Beyond that, it's entirely up to him how he manages to fit this square peg of a message board into the round hole that's available for it.

Yeah I'd be glad to store the archives, I managed to not only store but RESTORE a set of 50 year old damaged videotapes and
I still have material on hard drives that dated all the way back to 1993...new drives, because I migrated it off old drives when they began
to show their age.

Maybe I wasn't making myself clear enough...I am not saying that every post dating to the beginning must remain on a new server or
be accessible at the hosting company. I am saying that valuable materials are important, important enough that companies like Iron
Mountain are doing brisk business.

And I am saying that since everything is mostly text here at The Rant, the entire archive is probably not more than a few terabytes and
storage of that size is a trifle for a video editor because we live our daily lives in TB's...always have.
The movie "Toy Story" had a "camera" negative footprint of one terabyte and that was back in 1995 when a terabyte of data was
considered almost unimaginable and they were compressing the Hell out of the data to save space.
Toy Story 4 used up over FIFTY terabytes.

I bet the entire posting database all the way back to 1994 might total 4TB max and I'd be surprised if it's even that large.

Going back over the records, I have found we archived old posts after hitting a million posts. That seemed to be a point where the board slowed down to a crawl.

The last archive of old posts came in 2007 and this is where we stand now after archiving all posts over 100,000.

Forum Statistics
Total Forums 61
Total Topics 17293
Total Posts 314541

That is still a good number of posts, given the slowdown of bulletin boards in the social media era. Before 2007, however, we were hitting a million posts in about five years.

Maybe one idea would be to take a look at topics that have virtually no post in recent months or years as a possible way to downsize. It's not my call. The members and moderators should make the decision.

Doug

Getting the moderators together is like herding cats. They've mostly moved to other forums and only do occasional drive-by posting here these days.

I've sent Jon an email requesting he put in an appearance here and Jeffery is aware of the situation.

Other members and lurkers are certainly welcome to enter this discussion.

A lot is on the chopping block and time is short.

I'm going to start looking things over and deleting topics. For now it will be just garbage and I'll avoid Topics of any substance. I think I may need admin status to futz around with the forums but that needs re-organizing too.

As is my preference as a moderator, I will keep everything upfront and everyone informed.

I was having a conversation with a friend about setting up a server to host the archives. I have a few retired computers and numerous drives, as well as high speed unlimited internet. I don't see much difficulty in merging an active server with an archive server, privately managed.

I think the first order of business is identifying the data footprint of the current archives- how many terabytes? - and then finding a location for it.

I haven't managed anything as large as Reader Rant, ever, and haven't been a "techie" for - I checked - 22 years (when I managed a private website). I've been building a family website and it reminded me of how much I've forgotten and how much has changed since the turn of the century.

Here's a possible method. Pick a date - I recommend 3 years - and close those posts and archive them. Anything newer than that, we keep on the "active" server. That should be a fairly simple sort and we can archive the old stuff on a private server.