US Hawks Hang Gliding Association

Bob Kuczewski wrote:What happened to the existing (“old”) forum posts?

What happened to all of the existing (“old”) forum posts?

The old forum posts held a wealth of information and club history. What happened to all of those posts? Some of those posts were from our friends who are no longer with us. Are those posts available anywhere on line? And if not on line, can they be made available for rehosting elsewhere?

As an observation: We seem to be losing more information in the supposed “information era” than at any other point in human history. And it’s so needless since the availability of storage is growing exponentially. It only takes a few minutes to download and upload an entire forum history (database) to preserve it. Has that been done with the old forum posts?

Eric wrote:

Bob wrote:The old forum posts held a wealth of information and club history. What happened to all of those posts?

Agreed. I understand the new website forum may be technically incompatible with the old database.

But, the old forum should remain available as a “read only” archive. There is a wealth of historical information there. It would be a shame to lose it forever.

Bob wrote:I did a little poking around viewing the page sources for the new forum, and I am suspecting that this forum is now a WordPress “bbPress” site. If that’s true, then there are a number of converters from phpBB (old format) to bbPress. Here are some links:

https://wpmudev.com/blog/how-to-migrate ... d-bbpress/
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/phpbb- ... -practice/
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/bbpress-vs-phpbb/
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/introd ... 2x/page/8/
https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/a-phpb ... converter/
https://www.webnots.com/comparison-of-b ... bb-forums/
https://www.helloari.com/blog/2011/04/w ... omparison/

But I tend to agree with Eric that it might be easier just to let the previous forum live on in a “read only” state to preserve the history. Is there any reason that couldn’t be done?

If it’s a matter of workload, I am sure you will find some volunteers. I’ve been managing the US Hawks site (phpBB) for nearly 14 years now, and I could lend a hand. If nothing else, you could reactivate the old site just long enough to run a site-scraper to capture it all as static HTML pages. You could host those static pages anywhere in your current site. It would be better than nothing.

Most importantly, please don’t lose the history that has been built here for well over a decade.

Thanks.

Doug wrote:Likely serial format change to motion picture format (youtube) to improve profits.

ushawks now control all California hanggliding sites, ACA, Shga, Santa Barbara, Funston, San Berandito.

2028 Olympics in Los Angeles is our top priority. Palos Verdes flying site added if Newsome installs pegs to stablize land shift. ACA could employee site.

ushawks backs Murillo changes because of future benefit to California olympic revenue.

Bob wrote:

Eric wrote:But, the old forum should remain available as a “read only” archive.

That should be especially easy since the old forum’s URLs used the singular “forum”:

http://www.shga.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5196

While the new forum uses the plural form:

https://shga.com/forums/

So the old forum could continue to exist without conflicting with the new one. That would also preserve all of the external links into the Sylmar forum (which are now broken). Is there any reason that approach hasn’t been taken?

June 7, 2024, Bob Kuczewski wrote:
Over the past few decades, an uncounted number of pilots have posted to the SHGA forum. I went to archive.org and began collecting names from the remaining topics (most of the actual posts are no longer there). I stopped after 100 names. Here they are in ASCII alphabetical order (caps first):

1 AZB
2 AlC
3 Alan Crouse
4 Bob Kuczewski
5 BudRob
6 Busto
7 Chip
8 Christian
9 Cyndia
10 Dennis
11 DigitalBishop
12 Dizzy
13 Don
14 Dontsink
15 DrJeff
16 Eric
17 Fast Eddy
18 Fat Fred
19 FlyingSquirrel
20 Frederick
21 Gayle Ellett
22 Glenn
23 Greg DeWolf
24 Greg Kendall
25 JBBenson
26 JD
27 Jim
28 Joe Faust
29 Joseph
30 Julieann
31 Ken Andrews
32 Loren
33 Lucky 13
34 Lynn McLaughlin
35 M@rkus
36 Malury
37 Mike Blankenhorn
38 MikeI
39 MikeL
40 OP
41 OSCAR
42 RichardShaw
43 Rico
44 Rome Dodson
45 Ron Keinan
46 RonG
47 SHGA Communications
48 Spitfire
49 Steve Clark
50 Steve D
51 Steve90266
52 TerryH
53 Tom C
54 TomS
55 Vrezh
56 WingNutz
57 abinder
58 adambein
59 addicted2climbing
60 ajnanyc
61 beemer
62 brianscharp
63 bricksfly
64 chadness
65 dhmartens
66 dteal
67 ericbrown
68 filthy
69 frosty
70 glideher
71 greblo
72 gregangsten
73 gregas
74 henderthing
75 jcflies
76 jdelear
77 jdevorak
78 jfriesne
79 jidoni
80 jimshaw
81 jonesy
82 kyardley
83 lbunner
84 lswendt
85 magicpotato
86 mario
87 max
88 mrobin604
89 msoultan
90 olin
91 r8pistol
92 remmoore
93 robsherwood
94 rsherwoo
95 skygeek AKA Seabass
96 stebbins
97 theairdroid
98 vannoppen
99 wingedemily
100 wlatto

How can it be that anyone in this club has such little regard for history that they would delete everything that those 100 (and more) people had to say?

Each of those 100+ people had an idea for something they wanted to say, signed into the forum, spent some amount of time composing and typing their thoughts, and now they're all gone.

Once again, whoever did this, please participate in restoring this lost history.

Thank you.

June 13, 2024
Has the SHGA board of directors decided about the challenge of preserving all the old forum messages?
Please save the history and let it be available.
Please let me know.
Thank you,
Joe Faust

Doug Martens wrote:I came here to see old posts about the gliders that fought in the 80th anniversary of the D-day invasion and found those posts were deleted.

Joe Faust wrote:Open letter to SHGA Board of Directors:

Has the SHGA board of directors decided about the challenge of preserving all the old forum messages?
Please save the message history and let it be available.
Please let me know.
Thank you,
Joe Faust

Marshall Robin wrote:We have the full site intact with all old messages, so they are not lost. I’d like to see the archive available as well, so I’ll be looking into doing that in the near future.

Bob Kuczewski wrote:Thanks. Will the private messages be available also? Some of us used private messages as an email tool, and now all of those messages are inaccessible.

Marshall Robin wrote:I think I have all of that as well. I don’t know if there’s a migration path for it, however.

Bob Kuczewski wrote:Thanks Marshall. The first step is to be sure you’ve got everything, and it sounds like you do.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s fortunate that your old and new forums have different URLs so they can both coexist. However, that possibility might depend on whether or not your current hosting package will allow either another content management system (phpBB) or raw HTML pages to be installed on your site. If they allow that, then you have viable alternatives to importing or re-integrating the old posts. Those alternatives include reinstalling the site as a phpBB or as static pages.

My first preference (not that I have any clout in the matter) would be to reinstall phpBB at the same URL. It could be active (accepting new posts) or static (all logins and posting disabled). This is my first choice because it is the least disruptive to the rest of the web. There are maybe thousands of links to SHGA forum content on the web. Those links are at Google, Yahoo, hanggliding.org, OzForum, USHawks.org, other hang gliding clubs, and other places that we don’t even know. All of those links are now broken. By restoring the old forum (even as read-only), all of those links will work again.

My second choice would be to build static HTML pages from the database. I’ve just done something similar with the hanggliding.org “Call for Leaders and Founders” topic that started the HGAA and eventually the U.S. Hawks. The restored static pages are here:

https://ushawks.org/HGAA/Call_for_Leaders_and_Founders/

That would still result in broken external links because the static pages would use different URLs than the old PHP version. But the mapping might be predictable enough for sites to automate changing of links. You might also be able to use a rewrite rule to fix that on your site (depending on your hosting package).

My third preference would be merging them into the new CMS. I think this will be difficult for a number of reasons. First, the phpBB system allowed nesting of forums within forums. I don’t see any evidence of that in this new forum. The SHGA forum didn’t use deep nesting, but it still might be deeper than the new forum. Second, there may be other features of phpBB forums that don’t mesh easily with the new CMS. While an automated converter might appear to work, you might later find a number of things didn’t survive the merge.

Also, and independent of those choices, I would be happy to host the old forum on either the U.S. Hawks as a subforum (within U.S. Hawks) or as a separate forum. You should probably strip out the PM portion of the database in that case to protect people’s privacy.

Please let me know if I can help.

Doug Martens wrote:]I attempted to post another one of my opinion posts but due to loss of the old forum I cannot.

If you google “Rome dodson shga” you will find the last flight of Rome has been deleted where he was in his mid 80s and flying with oxygen tank to his nose. I meant to provide contrast with Joe Biden who is also in his 80s. Rome had delt with asbestos in his profession yet he played life to its last moment. Sadly he too has been erased with cancel culture. Rome was able to complete his last flight without incident.

This is all google will give you “The Passing Of A Friend

Sylmar Hang Gliding Association
http://shga.com › … › SHGA Forum › General Discussion
Feb 14, 2021 — Board index SHGA Forum General Discussion · The Passing Of … Our dear friend and long time Sylmar pilot, Rome Dodson, succumbed to his illness last night.

Bob Kuczewski wrote:I started this topic back in May. It’s now July. Doug is correct. There’s more of Rome’s memory left in the fragments of faceless search engines than in the club that he loved and supported during a good portion of his life.

Who was responsible for sitting by silently while history was erased?

Rome_2024-07-06.png (72.8 KiB) Viewed 50557 times

Lost_20240706.png (19.65 KiB) Viewed 50557 times

Bob Kuczewski wrote:So what’s been lost by the current SHGA administration?

You can get a glimpse of it here. That shows the SHGA forum home page as of May 17, 2021 at 5:44pm. At that time the site contained 18,961 posts spread across 4,247 topics with 536 members. Here are the breakdowns by forum section:

General Discussion: 2,076 Topics, 10,367 Posts, Last post by Steve90266 May 02, 2021

Safety and Incidents in flight: 224 Topics, 1,391 Posts, Last post by Vrezh May 13, 2021

TFR’s and NOTAMS: 54 Topics, 96 Posts, Last post by BudRob Oct 22, 2019

Flight Discussion: 389 Topics, 1,611 Posts, Last post by gregangsten May 15, 2021

Events: 384 Topics, 1,842 Posts, Last post by Frederick Feb 10, 2021

Club Projects: 48 Topics, 275 Posts, Last post by Frederick Jun 07, 2019

Weather: 51 Topics, 120 Posts, Last post by AlC Sep 06, 2020

Comp Discussion: 103 Topics, 392 Posts, Last post by Chip Oct 02, 2019

For Sale: 298 Topics, 569 Posts, Last post by remmoore, May 14, 2021

Lost and Found: 190 Topics, 330 Posts, Last post by JD, Feb 27, 2021

Flying Politics: 96 Topics, 1,070 Posts, Last post by Bob Kuczewski, Apr 20, 2021

Flying Videos: 256 Topics, 608 Posts, Last post by JD, May 16, 2021

Non-Flying Videos: 46 Topics, 92 Posts, Last post by jfriesne, Jun 29, 2020

Helpdesk: 18 Topics, 49 Posts, Last post by jdevorak Mon Jun 18, 2018 6:50 pm

All of those 18,961 hang gliding posts are now gone.
All of that shared knowledge and history is now gone.

Who would want to erase all of that history?
I think we all know.   

Bob Kuczewski wrote:So what’s been lost by the current SHGA administration?

You can get a glimpse of it here. That shows the SHGA forum home page as of May 17, 2021 at 5:44pm. At that time the site contained 18,961 posts spread across 4,247 topics with 536 members. Here are the breakdowns by forum section:

General Discussion: 2,076 Topics, 10,367 Posts, Last post by Steve90266 May 02, 2021

Safety and Incidents in flight: 224 Topics, 1,391 Posts, Last post by Vrezh May 13, 2021

TFR’s and NOTAMS: 54 Topics, 96 Posts, Last post by BudRob Oct 22, 2019

Flight Discussion: 389 Topics, 1,611 Posts, Last post by gregangsten May 15, 2021

Events: 384 Topics, 1,842 Posts, Last post by Frederick Feb 10, 2021

Club Projects: 48 Topics, 275 Posts, Last post by Frederick Jun 07, 2019

Weather: 51 Topics, 120 Posts, Last post by AlC Sep 06, 2020

Comp Discussion: 103 Topics, 392 Posts, Last post by Chip Oct 02, 2019

For Sale: 298 Topics, 569 Posts, Last post by remmoore, May 14, 2021

Lost and Found: 190 Topics, 330 Posts, Last post by JD, Feb 27, 2021

Flying Politics: 96 Topics, 1,070 Posts, Last post by Bob Kuczewski, Apr 20, 2021

Flying Videos: 256 Topics, 608 Posts, Last post by JD, May 16, 2021

Non-Flying Videos: 46 Topics, 92 Posts, Last post by jfriesne, Jun 29, 2020

Helpdesk: 18 Topics, 49 Posts, Last post by jdevorak Mon Jun 18, 2018 6:50 pm