Jolt Archive

[Vakolic]

Where did storefronts live then?

[Northrop-Grumman]

Where did storefronts live then?

II tended to be where they were shoved more often than not. Every once in a while someone would put them into NS but it'd never work. This also meant that II moved incredibly fast with the various competing RPs, storefronts, and so on.

[Zwangzug]

Yep, that's correct. (In addition, there was no sports subforum; those threads were in NS.)

[Vakolic]

Yep, that's correct. (In addition, there was no sports subforum; those threads were in NS.)

Another reason noone liked jolt?

[Ermarian]

That's excellent news. It also makes much more sense, because I'm sure I wouldn't have missed those boards if they existed. So yeah, archives are complete; you'd just have to dig a bit. There's no fulltext search or fancy meta-data, but Google would index it eventually.

[Vakolic]

How long would it take you to make it public?

[Zwangzug]

Another reason noone liked jolt?

Heh, it had its pros and cons. Without a specific subforum full of threads to model, anecdotally I want to say there were proportionally fewer new users starting new threads without knowing what they were doing. But, having our own space is nice too.

[Vakolic]

Another reason noone liked jolt?

Heh, it had its pros and cons. Without a specific subforum full of threads to model, anecdotally I want to say there were proportionally fewer new users starting new threads without knowing what they were doing. But, having our own space is nice too.

I like new people doing that, it encourages learning.

But I'm beginning to threadjack, 'll stop it.

[[violet]]

And since we've no place to go Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (Calendar time)

I have a VBulletin forum data dump that Jolt left us, but have never been able to come up with a good plan for what to do with it. In particular, it would be a daunting task to run an entirely separate forum to this one, using the old Jolt data. But if there's a way to throw it into static HTML pages like you've done above, I could definitely put that online.

[Unibot III]

And since we've no place to go Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! (Calendar time)

I have a VBulletin forum data dump that Jolt left us, but have never been able to come up with a good plan for what to do with it. In particular, it would be a daunting task to run an entirely separate forum to this one, using the old Jolt data. But if there's a way to throw it into static HTML pages like you've done above, I could definitely put that online.

This would be awesome.

[Querria]

If copyright is a concern for NS staff, believe me when I say it's not: Nationstates and it's owner(s) will be completely immune from any legal precedents if anybody should decide they want to spaz out and claim copyright over saying 'lulz' in a post from 2010, and will not be held liable if Ermarian posted any of the stuff from the jolt forum because it was not made on nationstates.net...

That said, Ermarian has some choices he can make. Gamestop holds legal rights to the IP content Ermarian has, since they bought a stake in Jolt when the company was still around. I would do the "right" thing & give the data to them so they can say what to do with it, and they may grant Ermarian permission to do whatever with it after scanning through the data itself, or just have him pay a small fee to buy his own rights to it. Then everything's cool

Or, there's an alternative..

How long would it take you to make it public?

Don't make it public. Think about it, right now the only ones to know about this is people who read this thread just about. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Jolt screw over Max Barry once upon a time? All they care about is money, so if they got their hands on the IP stuff, they'd just sell it off to private sources. I don't think NS players from the old forum want to have their stuff floating around cyberspace and suffer from telemarketing calls at 3AM because of this amiright?

Now, i'm not advocating anything here, but if this thread was mysteriously deleted then I never saw this. If some telegrams were set to delegates of the pacific regions and information exchanged hands regarding stuff on a "jolt forum" from 2010, I had no knowledge of it going on. Jolt, what's Jolt? Is that some kind of Jello?

[Communist Eraser]

If it's generally agreed that "NS" has the right to publish it, can't Ermarian just give his files to the NS admins, and the NS admins just put the static pages somewhere?

[Querria]

If it's generally agreed that "NS" has the right to publish it, can't Ermarian just give his files to the NS admins, and the NS admins just put the static pages somewhere?

Yeah, why not. Legally there's no copyright protection over the stuff Ermarian got from the Jolt forums anymore. If anybody wanted to claim it, the case would have to go through a court first to establish IP rights. That said, 'Gamestop'... just be cautious Ermarian. Don't go full banzai and announce to the world that you've got this stuff. Quietly give tidbits that people request or make it public, but through telegrams.

[Shadow Afforess]

Don't make it public. Think about it, right now the only ones to know about this is people who read this thread just about. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Jolt screw over Max Barry once upon a time? All they care about is money, so if they got their hands on the IP stuff, they'd just sell it off to private sources. I don't think NS players from the old forum want to have their stuff floating around cyberspace and suffer from telemarketing calls at 3AM because of this amiright?

I disagree. As long as the jolt archive is not monetized (ads or pay to view...) the worst the jolt owners could do is issue a DMCA takedown request. Then the material would have to be taken offline. There is no way the gamestop owners could prove the archive is causing monetary damages or losses, so there is no way they could bring a lawsuit forward.

I'd be happy to host the archives myself if I was given the files. I am not particularly worried about the legality, considering no one is left from Jolt who probably remembers or cares.

[Querria]

Don't make it public. Think about it, right now the only ones to know about this is people who read this thread just about. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Jolt screw over Max Barry once upon a time? All they care about is money, so if they got their hands on the IP stuff, they'd just sell it off to private sources. I don't think NS players from the old forum want to have their stuff floating around cyberspace and suffer from telemarketing calls at 3AM because of this amiright?

I disagree. As long as the jolt archive is not monetized (ads or pay to view...) the worst the jolt owners could do is issue a DMCA takedown request. Then the material would have to be taken offline. There is no way the gamestop owners could prove the archive is causing monetary damages or losses, so there is no way they could bring a lawsuit forward.

I'd be happy to host the archives myself if I was given the files. I am not particularly worried about the legality, considering no one is left from Jolt who probably remembers or cares.

Ah, my bad then. Thanks for doing this Ermarian, I'm happy to know NS got back of it's 'lost' history.

[[violet]]

If it's generally agreed that "NS" has the right to publish it, can't Ermarian just give his files to the NS admins, and the NS admins just put the static pages somewhere?

I'm not sure if Ermarian has the entire Jolt forum, so ideally I would convert the complete VBulletin data dump I have to static HTML. But if no-one has good ideas for how to do that, we would love to host Ermarian's static files.

[Shadow Afforess]

If it's generally agreed that "NS" has the right to publish it, can't Ermarian just give his files to the NS admins, and the NS admins just put the static pages somewhere?

I'm not sure if Ermarian has the entire Jolt forum, so ideally I would convert the complete VBulletin data dump I have to static HTML. But if no-one has good ideas for how to do that, we would love to host Ermarian's static files.

What format is the Vbulletin data in? If it is a database you could just write a quick and dirty script to list all threads/posts w/basic html. If you gave me a sample of the data I might be able to write something up...

[[violet]]

What format is the Vbulletin data in? If it is a database you could just write a quick and dirty script to list all threads/posts w/basic html. If you gave me a sample of the data I might be able to write something up...

It's a tarball of MySQL database files (.MYD and .MYI). I'm not sure how to tell what version of VB... I'm loading it locally and will see what it looks like inside.

[Esternial]

If it's generally agreed that "NS" has the right to publish it, can't Ermarian just give his files to the NS admins, and the NS admins just put the static pages somewhere?

I'm not sure if Ermarian has the entire Jolt forum, so ideally I would convert the complete VBulletin data dump I have to static HTML. But if no-one has good ideas for how to do that, we would love to host Ermarian's static files.

That would be pretty nice.

[Ermarian]

Well, from what I can see in my old crawler on github, the old vBulletin board on Jolt had an "archive" mode that dynamically rendered pages for download. The URLs looked like this:

Code: Select all

define('URL_ROOT', 'http://forums.joltonline.com/archive/index.php/');
define('URL_FORUM', URL_ROOT . 'f-%d.html');
define('URL_FORUM_PAGER', URL_ROOT . 'f-%d-p-%d.html');
define('URL_TOPIC', URL_ROOT . 't-%d.html');
define('URL_TOPIC_PAGER', URL_ROOT . 't-%d-p-%d.html');


Of course, if you have the database dump, you'd probably need the original vBulletin software, or else rewrite part of its database logic, which sounds painful.
Yeah, it's certainly possible to use the vBulletin software and my script above to get the same files I have from the database dump. Or we can transfer the files (tarball is about 1.2GB); I also wrote a very primitive PHP script that nice-ified some of the links and page layout while serving the static files. [screenshot]
But that's not really ideal; just the best I could do. The conversion lost a ton of metadata and formatting - as far as I can tell it didn't even preserve quote tags. The database dump contains lots more information than this.

(woah, nine posts while writing)

Edit: 1.2GB, of course, not 1200.

[Esternial]

Well, from what I can see in my old crawler on github, the old vBulletin board on Jolt had an "archive" mode that dynamically rendered pages for download. The URLs looked like this:

Code: Select all

define('URL_ROOT', 'http://forums.joltonline.com/archive/index.php/');
define('URL_FORUM', URL_ROOT . 'f-%d.html');
define('URL_FORUM_PAGER', URL_ROOT . 'f-%d-p-%d.html');
define('URL_TOPIC', URL_ROOT . 't-%d.html');
define('URL_TOPIC_PAGER', URL_ROOT . 't-%d-p-%d.html');


Of course, if you have the database dump, you'd probably need the original vBulletin software, or else rewrite part of its database logic, which sounds painful.
Yeah, it's certainly possible to use the vBulletin software and my script above to get the same files I have from the database dump. Or we can transfer the files (tarball is about 1200GB); I also wrote a very primitive PHP script that nice-ified some of the links and page layout while serving the static files. [screenshot]
But that's not really ideal; just the best I could do. The conversion lost a ton of metadata and formatting - as far as I can tell it didn't even preserve quote tags.

(woah, nine posts while writing)

Judging from the screenshot, it seems better than I feared.

[Blackhelm Confederacy]

Yea, I def want to get my hands on this if I can

[Cerillium]

Yea, I def want to get my hands on this if I can

Ditto.

[[violet]]

The conversion lost a ton of metadata and formatting - as far as I can tell it didn't even preserve quote tags. The database dump contains lots more information than this.

Yes, the dataset I have seems much bigger. It's putting up a bit of a fight as I try to load it into MySQL locally, but I should be able to produce a sample soon.

[Esternial]

The conversion lost a ton of metadata and formatting - as far as I can tell it didn't even preserve quote tags. The database dump contains lots more information than this.

Yes, the dataset I have seems much bigger. It's putting up a bit of a fight as I try to load it into MySQL locally, but I should be able to produce a sample soon.

Cast "paralyse" to weaken it!

On a more serious note, I'm looking forward to seeing it. It's like we're popping open one of those time capsule thingies.