Not found - VirtualDub forums (looking for mirror site)

[raffriff42]

http://forums.virtualdub.org/Not found - VirtualDub forums

Sorry, the VirtualDub forums have been closed, and as of this date (22 Oct 2015), it's now down. I was going to leave it up in read-only mode longer, but someone decided to run a web spider that pulled 100GB+ in less than a month, which is threatening to blow my bandwidth allocation.

Return to main website (virtualdub.org) (http://virtualdub.org/) This ranks as one of the dumbest things ever done by an otherwise intelligent person. Not only to close the forum in the first place, because "it's too much work" (99% of the "work" done was performed by the user community, and the other 1% would have been done by us also, if asked; and now what will you use for support? Email?), but to make it Internet Archive (https://archive.org/web/) resistant by a stupid robots.txt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard) policy, and by inserting "sessionid=" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_ID) into every URL (which BTW is why the bandwidth was so high, duh).

It makes me sad, as I had put a lot of work into documenting usage of filters and other things like external encoders. I was a minor character though - others had contributed much more.

Is all this knowledge lost forever? Is anyone mirroring the this forum's content?

And if anyone knows Avery Lee in real life, would you please deliver a kind & gentle smack upside the head to him, from me? :) Thank you.

[shekh]

Is all this knowledge lost forever?

I guess he didnt wipe the forum, just disabled access. So you still may have chance to clone it if you ask him to do so ;)
I have no idea what kind of software is involved there.

[raffriff42]

Mirroring a forum is a matter of obtaining the backup from the old forum (a big .ZIP file in my limited experience), getting a web hosting provider (which can be costly), installing version-compatible forum framework software* and restoring from backup. The backup & restore is usually done using a standard tool such as phpMyAdmin, made available by the hosting provider though the account control panel.

Or someone could negotiate the takeover of the existing forum and keep it running in read-only mode.

* Looking at the archived forum index (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20150928222959/http://forums.virtualdub.org/) (sadly, only the index page is archived), the software used was "Invision Power Board 1.1.2," which was free (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Power_Board), but is now completely out of date, not secure and not supported. According to this support thread (https://community.invisionpower.com/topic/347894-invision-power-board-v112-mysqlphp-versions/), updating to a current version ($75 (https://www.invisionpower.com/buy/self-hosted)) looks a bit tricky, but again it looks like Invision can handle the job for you - at what cost I don't know.

Sadly, I am not prepared to handle the hosting costs myself.

[shekh]

I thought more realistic is to host it locally as is - just to extract whatever materials are important.

[hello_hello]

I wonder if the web spider that resulted in the forum being taken down was due to someone trying to archive the content before it was taken down. I guess that'd be ironic if they planned to host a mirror, although if that were the case it seems silly not to have asked first.

[raffriff42]

It looks like the Virtualdub forum (as of Sept 18 2015) is up on the Wayback machine now (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20150928222959/http://forums.virtualdub.org/). Hooray!

Some links apparently fail when you click them, but there is a workaround: if you get a
"Hrm... Wayback Machine doesn't have that page archived" message, manually remove the
session ID from the URL, shown below in red -- so this:

.../index.php?s=63edc5e460f1198cc7e44fadaabf5378&act=SF&f=7

becomes this:
.../index.php?act=SF&f=7

--------------------
If you click on non-Archive.org VirtualDub link or bookmark you will get a
"Not found - VirtualDub forums" message just as before, but now, if you paste
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20150928235309/

in front of the URL, you should be able to access the archived version.
You may have to remove the session ID as well.

[StainlessS]

Lovely job RR.

If any thread/post in this forum should be Stickied, then this is it.

[movmasty]

Disaster! :eek:

Of "How to use the external encoder feature"
only the first 3 pages and the last(14) could be recovered.

What a disgrace for a Virtualdub addicted like me :scared:

[raffriff42]

Yeah, sadly, not all the pages are archived (hopefully they will be in time?)

[movmasty]

How can you archive something that in not more online?

[raffriff42]

Maybe the data is stored but not online yet. Yeah, wishful thinking. Avery Lee could re-enable his site with permission given only to archive.org if he wanted to, among many possibilities that are better than what he has done.