#1

hello everyone,

so many of you know that lines evolved from the old monome forum, which had been active for almost as long as monome has existed (we switched forum software once early on.) there is quite a lot of information there-- some good, some relevant, but also a lot of noise, and worst of all some information that is no longer valid and misleading.

i know some of you have strong feelings about the fate of this archived forum. currently i’m paying several hundred $ per year simply to have this old web server stay as-is, and this is an expense i’d like to get rid of.

so-- i’m looking for suggestions on how to archive (properly) this site and move it somewhere very inexpensive, or preferably, free. at the moment it’s basically a huge stack of text. there is nothing app-like about it.

the old forum runs on vanilla forum. the search is absolute shit. i’m not sure if simply moving the software completely to a new server, or installing a new vanilla system with the backed up mysql data, or doing some sort of page-by-page spider export to html…

i’m in need of volunteers that know about this stuff! so i can stay focussed on building these new fun music toys…

3 Likes
#3

i personally find the archive useful. i recently dug up some old code that was really helpful… i use google to search (if i try to find these things on lines i get nothing)

just for example i was trying to figure out how /map commands work, but there’s literally no info about that here on lines, it’s all on the monome forum.

i agree it’s not worth paying hundreds a year for, but it would be great if we could find an alternative or something like you suggest.

6 Likes
#4

short of a kind benefactor mirroring it as-is and paying those bills, what about moving it to GitHub? GH also has wiki functionality if necessary, though that would require more conversion work. or moving to a cheaper, static-html hosting site, disabling the server-side search/db entirely.

is the old forum currently on archive.org? that’s a less friendly UI to wade through, but at least it would more or less contain its last-used state.

#5

Something like this should work for conversion to static HTML

https://renoirboulanger.com/blog/2015/05/converting-dynamic-site-static-copy/

Then gh-pages for hosting and google custom search for search.

2 Likes
#6

so cool, thank you
I’ve found the old forum very helpful
also, it’s clear there is mucho knowledge
here on lines
perhaps I’ll start a new thread

#7

I shot a note to a friend who works at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org), and he said if it’s of interest: “The (associated but not officially connected) volunteer Archive Team can do this in short order… and it will end up in the Archive.”

Lemme know if this is of interest.

7 Likes
#8

I don’t know anything about the technicalities but I see the elektronauts forum moved to discourse and managed to move all the conversations from their old forum over too. Was that ever a possibility for lines? Too complicated or expensive?

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#9

+1 for archive.org

Though maybe adding a banner to the thread pages indicating that the information is probably outdated before archiving them is a good idea too?

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#10

even though there’s a lot of valuable infos and knowledge there, sometimes i think ‘hey do it like Orpheus was told to : move on and don’t look back’

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#11

archive.org should be of interest regardless of whether we also pursue other means of making an archive. It’s good to have an archive of the web as time progresses. I just wish their methods were better at capturing binary files (images, sound files, .zips, etc)

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#12

is there any way to preserve all the file links that would potentially be broken (files hosted on archive.monome.org)?

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#13

My reply above would do it:

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#14

I’ll inquire about this (and also note @jasonw22’s reply).

#15

imho,
the archive is valuable
in my limited (in)experience with the Academy, terminology matters/ 'that’s not philosophy, that’s sociology, no anthropology, no art history, or art, or music…
perhaps there is a way to describe the 'monome archives in such a way as to make them desired by an institution of higher learning- like `'self-help graphics at ucla


:slightly_smiling_face:
http://www.create.ucsb.edu?

#16

I haven’t had time to run a wget yet. Running it is no big deal, but checking that it got everything is a little more time consuming. But I posted instructions above if anybody wants to give it a try.

#17

cool, I’m thinking it’s actually valuable to a UC, Yale, NYU or somewhere
they have archives, and monome may only be looking for a few terabytes
plus, it really is a part of the academic computer music scene :slight_smile:

#18

github pages is a very easy and free way to host static html. Just need to grab it all (including any linked binaries and images) and do some spot checking to make sure it worked first.

It won’t be anywhere near “terabytes”. Much smaller.

1 Like
#19

Did you ever hear anything from archive.org?

#20

just checked, looks to be around 5GB.

would be so grateful is someone checked this out and took it on. otherwise i’ll get to it this winter.

1 Like
#21

Looks like github pages has a 1GB “suggested” size limit.
https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-my-disk-quota/

So I might look around for another hosting solution.