Having been really busy over the past couple of weeks I might have missed some announcement, sorry ... but it looks like the old IPB style links are no longer valid. This was one of my major worries about the vBulletin switchover, but Danny et al seemed to have added extra code to make the old index.php?showtopic=NNNNN links redirect to the right threads under the new scheme. . Now, the redirect appears to take me to some sort of archive page with hundreds of unrelated links. For example, http://priuschat.com/index.php?showtopic=31545 was galaxee/DH's expose' of the tank bladder, and now that and numerous other links I have in my "linkfarm" as well as other postings are invalid. . I'm willing to go fix all my web stuff to use the new format, but how do I find the old threads?? And how can guest users see the various pictures and such within, if you've now got that locked down against them? . It feels like we're on the verge of losing a really valuable resource that anyone on the net can see. Please tell me it ain't so. . _H*
I really wouldn't mind getting some feedback on this, either to tell me I'm doing something wrong, or an active interest in working to update all those external and cross-linked posts that, without the old thread numbers working, are ALL BROKEN. The current state of things is like starting all over to build a referenceable knowledge base, and that's far too much make-work for no good reason. Why were the thread numbers lost/changed? . _H*
I don't think your doing anything wrong because the redirect links were working a while back. I don't know when they stopped working because this is the second time I tried one since the forum upgrade. I too need to go thorough my website updating links but I think mine will be easier because I think all of mine are my own topics plus I don't have as many. I don't think anything was said about the redirect not working but I haven't been watching the issues topic very much. If anyone knows whats going on could you inform us?
Try this link, that I've had on my external "linkfarm" for a couple of years: _ http://priuschat.com/index.php?showtopic=10705 that should have gone directly to some of the original threads about the Pittsburgh MPG marathon. Instead, I get a page with 200 nondescript "archive" links on it, which doesn't help in the slightest since they seem to point all over hell and gone. . With a little digging I can find the old threads, but at this point the one I tried pointing to might be 9387, 10132, or 10274. So external links, of which there are many across multiple sites, are broken. . What's more serious is the INTERNAL links that people post, pointing newbies to old threads -- all of *those* are broken too, so rather than good MPG hints or tire-buying advice they'll find some useless political screed instead. WHY is nobody taking any interest in this problem? We're having a serious knowledge-loss issue here, and Priuschat's credibility risks heading straight into the toilet unless this is FIXED. It's always been one of the best resources on the net because the knowledge here pretty much goes back to day one, but now it's entombed under tons of mismatched-links wreckage. . How the hell did this happen, and what do we do to recover? Danny?? . _H*
Well, I've poked various mods a little harder, and nobody's sure what's up, and Danny appears to be AWOL. In the meantime I've managed to recover updated pointers to various threads I remember as being permanently worthwhile, and have started dropping them into my linkfarm. . If you know the new thread number, you don't need to know which subforum it was in -- vBulletin can simply find them by their unique number and redirect to the official URL of whatever it is now. Thus, a thread can be retrieved as priuschat.com/forums/x/NNNNN-x.html where XXXXX is the new thread number. The "x" parts can be any string; vBulletin ignores those. . So far I've dredged up these, for example: __ old _____ new _____ topic______________________ _ 22210 ___ 21501 ___ ECU/fob reprogrammability from scratch _ 31545 ___ 30593 ___ gas tank bladder exposed _ 30906 ___ 29957 ___ engine reseal pix _ 29898 ___ 28970 ___ what services you really need all from Galaxee, that I had kept pointers to in my own records. But there are probably plenty of other "seminal" postings people have made over the years, and maybe this is our opportunity to really sit down and put together a "best of Priuschat" in conjunction with figuring out where said "best-of" has actually gone in the meantime. Contributions welcome, even if in the form of vague hints about ballpark timeframe, who might have posted it, topic, etc. That giant list of "archive" numbers you see when you just go to "priuschat.com" is a somewhat useful search tool, *IF* you know what you're looking for. . Now, all we have to do is make it so not-logged-in outside folks can download the pictures. . _H*
