Copying important posts from Basejumper.com

[wmw999 2,439]

Basejumper.com is going away in a couple of days; someone linked to a post about Carl Boenish at the Troll Wall that might be worth saving. If anyone wants to save important or generally useful posts from Basejumper. Com, now is the time, and here is at least a place. 
If you do, some guidelines (so that we don’t inundate the servers): 

• Pick individual posts, not whole threads, unless it’s the discussion that’s important.
• Add something at the beginning indicating why this is worth saving
• Title it with “Archive: “ and a unique title

If there are enough, and enough interest, a separate archive (like the pre-2007 one that already exists) might be created. But that would take time, and right now is when you should be copying things if you want to. 
 

Wendy P. 

[sfzombie13 324]

i'm sure it's being copied by someone.  more importantly, wtf is up with the guest posts?  well, maybe not more importantly, but worth looking at. 

[TomAiello 26]

I think the best case would be to create a big archive accessible from a link here.

I think that if it's not possible to do that here, it's very likely that someone else will copy the post database and put it up somewhere else, but personally I'd rather see it here.

 

[wmw999 2,439]

Now is the time to talk about it. I'm not the person (lacking skills & time) and I don't know if Meso has time at the moment (apparently Sangiro's business, Meso's actual job, is busy right now). So it might be that a member or two who can, should archive them. And, well, maybe if someone is bored, they could index it, and even cull some of completely irrelevant threads, so that it's not just a static archive of everything.

Wendy P.

[sfzombie13 324]

someone may or may not be doing just that, but i think that a complete archive is the best bet in this case.  the only real issue is the cgi scripting, but that should be fairly easy to iron out.  i wish i had time to do it myself, it's good practice, but it's a hell of a complicated site.

[Administrator 52]

Just to comment on this. We've backed up the entire site internally, both the site files and the database. So it is theoretically possible for us to work on this data at some point and try do something with it. We do want to have it archived in some manner, it's just the process to do so is a very costly and time-consuming one. So we've still got to get scope of what's realistically possible.

The BASE forums are on the same software as the old Dropzone forums, which took us an unbelievable amount of time and investment in order to migrate due to the lack of automated migration tools for that forum software, everything needed to be manually programmed by a hired freelance developer.

I did just want to reiterate that we do have the data, Basejumper.com will be switched off in a few minutes, but the actual site data won't be completely lost in absolute. And we do hope to find a way forward for that data.

[pchapman 279]

I'm glad I took a few hours to download a bunch of posts from recent years that I hadn't gotten around to, some of the story threads & incident discussions & technical discussions, etc.

(Just downloaded manually, no scripts, so one had to click 'view all' to get the full thread on one page for long threads, and any attachments one really cared about, had to be downloaded manually.)

It's one of those things where to the inexperienced, one thinks, "should be easy to write a few scripts to save all that stuff", but as Admin says above, they didn't find it that easy to migrate the old dropzone.com format. (And they still lost attachments in that move...)

Hope they find a way to bring back some of the old info, even if the site wasn't as popular in recent years as it once was.

Edited December 1, 2021 by pchapman

[sfzombie13 324]

it didn't cost me a thing to run httrack on the website and grab a lot of it, and preserve it exactly as it was, scripts and all.  had i been a little more familiar with the settings, i would have an entire copy of it right now.  it is time consuming, but free.  not sure how httrtack works on a local copy, but it is not hard at all to archive a website as read only, keeping it working is the hard part.  

[pchapman 279]

40 minutes ago, sfzombie13 said:

it didn't cost me a thing to run httrack on the website and grab a lot of it,

That's the kind of answer I was hoping to draw out with my post about my own simplistic hours-before-it-shut-down copying.  "We" -- well any readers who cared -- had a month, but didn't get organized to make a plan to archive it well. At least the owners have kept the data even if it is offline.

[sfzombie13 324]

the data isn't doing much good offline, now is it?   an archived read only copy needs to be hosted somewhere.  no reason to pay anyone to do anything to it and ads on every page makes it a revenue generator, not a drain.  i don't recall hearing anything about it a month ago, but was involved in helping copy the website by another person, but i did not have the skills to help much.  that was ongoing for about two weeks.  with another two weeks we would have gotten it all.  it took almost two weeks to figure out the settings for the copy.  if it were not for the damned cgi scripting it would have been copied twice by now in that two weeks.  data transfer was limited to 3 and 4 kbps in some cases, rarely more than 56 kbps, or about twice dial up speed. 

[pchapman 279]

For the record, it makes sense to link to the archive that someone actually did create, independently of this site:

http://basejumper.net

The thread about it is:

https://www.dropzone.com/forums/topic/274141-basejumpernet-archive/

 

[turkeyphant 1]

I don't get why it was shut down in the first place?

[TomAiello 26]

The traffic on the site was very low, and it didn't make financial sense to maintain it separately.  The owner of the sites (both DZ.com and BASEjumper.com) made the decision to shut that one down and move the BASE conversations here.

It also has the benefit that skydivers who are curious about BASE have an easier place to ask questions and get answers.

 

[turkeyphant 1]

On 1/14/2022 at 4:03 PM, TomAiello said:

The traffic on the site was very low, and it didn't make financial sense to maintain it separately.  The owner of the sites (both DZ.com and BASEjumper.com) made the decision to shut that one down and move the BASE conversations here.

It also has the benefit that skydivers who are curious about BASE have an easier place to ask questions and get answers.

 

The running costs would have been less than $50 p.a. I'm sure there are dozens of basejumpers who would have gladly covered that to keep it running as it was.