Hello!
anonymous1337 wrote:PS: If anyone has the time, think we can occasionally scrape all of the [ code] blocks off of the site and archive them on GitHub?
In my opinion, the main problem is the files stored on individually operated small home pages. They are referred to on the forums using external links. These home pages including their download packages usually live a few months or maybe even years, but after that time they vanish with all the valuable contents. This may be due to a shift in personal interests or other reasons. The external links referring to these files and pages persist on the forum. They become dead links, thereby rendering the topics meaningless (, as their subjects of discussion fade away to 404).
Contrasting to that, the contents of code boxes on the forum stay here permanently. Their availability is not dependent on the authors' willingness to go on maintaining their personal home pages. As long as the forum exists, the contents of the code boxes will stay available. So I don't think we really need some kind of backup archive for the forum code boxes.
Moreover, it's not reasonable to assume that everything between [ code] ... [/ code] is correct and fine example code, suited for a code snippet section. The code boxes might contain meaningless fragments of only a few lines, erroneous codes etc. So an automated CodeBox-->CodeSnippetArchive process might be inadequate.
But I absolutely share your basic intent. The contents hot-linked on the forum should really be perserved for the future. It is very sad that externally stored contents vanish after just a few months or years. So I agree to anonymous1337: Use reliable, future-proof and free code storage locations instead of personal homepages or so called one-click hosters.
If someone is interested, I can also offer free file storage opportunities on the servers of
http://www.FreeBASIC-Portal.de. The maintainers of the German/Austrian/Swiss FreeBASIC community ensure a reliable and enduring operation of its services. We've been operating our forums since 2004 and the FreeBASIC-Portal since 2007. In 2012 we were happy to celebrate the 5th anniversary of our FB portal. And I'm sure, we'll still be online in 2017 for the 10th birthday. ;) So if someone here is looking for a durable storage location for his/her FreeBASIC related stuff, ask me for a hosting account on our server. The FreeBASIC-Portal team will be happy to support your FreeBASIC projects and community activities.
e-mail: sebastian {at} freebasic-portal.de
By the way, I've been thinking of a FreeBASIC file archive for years, but still had not the spare time to implement a prototype.
- A crawler periodically reads all new postings on the forum.
- Hyperlinks to external sources (e.g. http://mypersonalhomepage.trashyfreehos ... me-1.0.rar) are extracted.
- The referenced files are downloaded to the archive server.
- Meta information (posting link, thread ID, thread title, posting ID, posting title, time, author, ...) is stored along with the downloaded file in the database.
- If the author updates the file later, the crawler will notice that by analyzing the HTTP "Last-Modified" header. In case of updates, the new version is fetched and also put into the database.
- In order to avoid license issues, I thought of something like that: We open a special dedicated consent-thread here. Everybody, who agrees that their externally stored files are archived in the FB archive, posts a message like "I agree" using his forum account. The crawler would read the postings in this thread and determine that way, whose files can be made publicly available on the archive website.
If someone else would like to have such an archive, I'm happy to work together with you. :) I simply don't have enough free time at the moment to build/program such a system entirely on my own. Server operation / sponsoring will be no problem, as the FB portal has a few server systems available.
Yours,
Sebastian
-- one of the FreeBASIC-Portal.de guys
