Old HP Museum Forum

[Eric Rechlin]

It's been almost 5 years since the old HP Museum Forum was retired and this beautiful new forum took its place. There is still plenty of great information on the old forum, but it's extremely difficult to browse in its current form.

As some of you know, I've been working on a new site that archives old HP calculator sites because of their historic significance. I feel that the old forum's discussions are something worthy of adding to this archive.

Recently I have been working on parsing all the data in the old forum and loading it into MyBB software, just like what is used for this forum (though I am running a newer version -- 1.8 instead of 1.6). It's still a work-in-progress, and I will be continuing to refine it, but you can browse it at the following location:

https://archived.hpcalc.org/museumforum/

I was amazed to see that there were nearly 175,000 posts in the old forum, from 1999 to 2013. I believe approximately 1,000 posts were lost before Dave started archiving it, though. Add that to 97,000 posts (as of this writing) made to the new forum, and around 230,000 posts made to comp.sys.hp48 that I have archived, and that's half a million posts about HP calculators!

Dave Hicks, if you are interested in using anything I put together, just let me know and I'll send you whatever you want.

[Thomas Radtke]

Very nice, thank you!

[ggauny@live.fr]

Hi,

Impossible to login or register. My email is not valid it is said ??? If I want a new password the same sentence is given to me.

[Thomas Radtke]

(08-15-2018 07:17 AM)ggauny@live.fr Wrote:  Impossible to login or register.

Eric for sure won't have your credentials. Even if he had, it would be impossible to guarantee that usernames match an individual user due to acounts had to be recreated with the new forum.

Edit:

One question, is the threaded structure intact? Could we sitch to it? Would be very useful since this feature had been heavily used!

[Steve Simpkin]

Wow, very cool! I found my first post from 05-27-1999 confirming the existence of the HP49G. I can't believe it was 19 years ago.
Thank you Eric. For all of your work.

[Didier Lachieze]

(08-15-2018 07:29 AM)Thomas Radtke Wrote:  One question, is the threaded structure intact? Could we sitch to it? Would be very useful since this feature had been heavily used!

Yes the threaded structure appears to be there and you can select between linear and threaded mode however in threaded mode it seems you can read only one message at a time which is a bit painful.

Linear mode :


Threaded mode:

[Harald]

Thank you Eric!
This makes browsing and searching the old forum a lot easier!
I even found my old posts (I didn't post a lot back then) from between 2002 and 2005, beofore I somehow lost my password and created a new account.

Cheers,
Harald

[Thomas Radtke]

(08-15-2018 08:25 AM)Didier Lachieze Wrote:  Yes the threaded structure appears to be there and you can select between linear and threaded mode however in threaded mode it seems you can read only one message at a time which is a bit painful.

Thank you! Good to have it preserved.

[Massimo Gnerucci]

Thank you Eric!

[Sylvain Cote]

Great!
Thank you Eric!
Sylvain

[Eric Rechlin]

Because all I had to work with was the plain text of the old forum, yes, there's no way I'd have your credentials to log in. Also, because this is meant as a permanent historic record that acts as a time capsule, I do not want anyone logging in anyway, which is why I block the registration of new accounts.

I agree that seeing a better threaded view would be ideal. I don't know if it's possible to do that with the MyBB software, however. As you can see I did make an effort to keep all the parent-child relationships intact so it is theoretically possible, but it's definitely less than ideal with the current threaded view.

I did notice a number (perhaps on the order of 1000) of duplicate posts in the old site, apparently caused by some bug in the archiving process rather than accidental double-posting, and I removed these with the new site.

The spacing isn't always right in the message displays, but I haven't found a way around this. It seems to be a conflict between the HTML used for formatting on the data I scraped and the automatic formatting MyBB tries to do.

[rprosperi]

Really, really nice work Eric; this makes browsing (and searching) the old Forums usable. The threaded view 'issues' are not optimal, but a very minor issue IMHO.

It would indeed be nice if Dave could integrate this into the current Forum, though I totally agree it would have to remain read-only, to be used as an archive of the earlier days.

Thanks so much and very well done!!

[Thomas Radtke]

And finally I found that butten for Thread Mode...

Would it be possible to write a script that inserts the parent node as quote if there's nothing quoted? That woud greatly improve readabilty in Linear Mode imo.

[Eric Rechlin]

All right, I found a plugin which makes it so threaded mode works much better, and I've set threaded mode as the default. As a bonus, you can even collapse subthreads now if you want. This should be much more readable now!

[Thomas Radtke]

(08-15-2018 03:43 PM)Eric Rechlin Wrote:  All right, I found a plugin which makes it so threaded mode works much better, and I've set threaded mode as the default. As a bonus, you can even collapse subthreads now if you want. This should be much more readable now!

Excellent!!!

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(08-15-2018 03:43 PM)Eric Rechlin Wrote:  All right, I found a plugin which makes it so threaded mode works much better, and I've set threaded mode as the default. As a bonus, you can even collapse subthreads now if you want. This should be much more readable now!

Phuntastic! :)
Excellent work, thanks once more.

[Zaphod]

Excellent stuff

Can I ask whilst I’m here ... what does the circled (in the attached photo) do ?

Is it a rep button ?

[Dieter]

(08-15-2018 06:14 PM)Zaphod Wrote:  Can I ask whilst I’m here ... what does the circled (in the attached photo) do ?
Is it a rep button ?

I don't know what a "rep button" is, but I can tell you what the button with the green plus does: When replying to a post it allows quoting multiple posts in the same reply.

Try it: log in, press this button below one post and the "quote" button below another one. Both posts will be quoted in the message editor. You can now delete the irrelevant parts and keep the desired quote portions from both posts.

Dieter

[Eddie W. Shore]

(08-15-2018 06:17 AM)Eric Rechlin Wrote:  It's been almost 5 years since the old HP Museum Forum was retired and this beautiful new forum took its place. There is still plenty of great information on the old forum, but it's extremely difficult to browse in its current form.

As some of you know, I've been working on a new site that archives old HP calculator sites because of their historic significance. I feel that the old forum's discussions are something worthy of adding to this archive.

Recently I have been working on parsing all the data in the old forum and loading it into MyBB software, just like what is used for this forum (though I am running a newer version -- 1.8 instead of 1.6). It's still a work-in-progress, and I will be continuing to refine it, but you can browse it at the following location:

https://archived.hpcalc.org/museumforum/

I was amazed to see that there were nearly 175,000 posts in the old forum, from 1999 to 2013. I believe approximately 1,000 posts were lost before Dave started archiving it, though. Add that to 97,000 posts (as of this writing) made to the new forum, and around 230,000 posts made to comp.sys.hp48 that I have archived, and that's half a million posts about HP calculators!

Dave Hicks, if you are interested in using anything I put together, just let me know and I'll send you whatever you want.

14 years, how fast time flies. Nice work, Eric.

[pier4r]

Amazing work eric! Not only a copy, but a browsable copy! Awesome!

I'd hug you if I could.