Old iDG posts/threads appear deleted, is this true?

I wanted to find an old very useful long post someone write that would help someone but it seems to be deleted or missing because it's old. What's going on here?

unknown Wrote:Old iDG posts/threads appear deleted, is this true?

I wanted to find an old very useful long post someone write that would help someone but it seems to be deleted or missing because it's old. What's going on here?

It wouldn't surprise me: my account recently got spontaneously deleted around a month ago, and I had to set it back up with some help from Carlos. I wouldn't be surprised if other stuff got deleted as well.

Yeh, Carlos recently posted something about a forum purge...

Carlos if you purged these old posts is it possible to restore them with a backup? I am disappointed if they are permanently deleted for several reasons.

• If posts just get deleted then people aren't going to take the time to write detailed and interesting posts rather than just answering someones question breifly.
• people search for old messages that have valuable information in them to show to other people
• people use search engines and find useful information in forums even in the inactive/old threads
  

Hello,

I see posts going back to 2008. I haven't done any mass purges. I have removed some that had no replies or where just along the lines of 'Apple released the Cube'. But as I said, no mass purges. I have though deleted the search index which became greater than the actual forum posts. It is a weakness of vBulletin that the search index grows to crazy sizes. With the size it was at, it was becoming troublesome to backup. Over time, the search index gets rebuilt. Back to why there are no posts before 2008. That is troubling. I don't recall having a massive crash that wiped out posts back in 2008. Very odd. So, I can only guess that (a) a MOD has deleted posts, which they have the power to do (b) it is related to the many troubles we are having with our server as of late. (FYI: The server we are on is having critical problems. I keep aking host to just move us to a new VPS, but they insist in sending the trouble ticket higher and higher up their support chain.. grrr.. We are at the highest tier now. Site works but underlining stuff is wacky.)

As for the question, 'Can things be restored?' I'm not sure, my initial answer would be that you can't selectively restore posts. It would screw up much if I did.

In a related topic, in terms of users, I have various level of purging. If emails don't work, I set the users to 'nonworking emails', if the user hasn't visited in a year but had a good amount of posts, I set them to inactive, and if the user hasn't visited in some time and had one post, I kill them. These tend to be the people who posted some ad or spam and will never return. Once in a while, I might trip up, as I did with akb825, but we were able to regain his posts.

Cheers,

I'll keep you all posted.

Wanted to give you all an update.

Older posts are indeed here and not deleted. I myself thought they were as I had my forum preferences to show only posts newer than 1 year. As for searching, the index was deleted to reduce forum size. It will slwoly get rebuilt. BTW, Google's index works pretty well for the forum... most posts are indexed.

Cheers,