Missing threads/messages from the old forums

[VileR]

Maybe I'm having an extreme case of delayed ignition, but it seems that a lot of content from the old pre-migration forums is completely MIA.
To be clear, I'm not referring to the separate issue of broken links in older threads (where the content may still exist, but cannot be accessed with the old URLs).

I was reminded of a certain old discussion that was had here, so I tried searching for the one keyword I definitely recall from it ("TMQ", an old software house). Nothing turns up, and google's no help either; if they ever indexed that thread in the first place, they must've pulped the long-dead URL by now.

Of course, I could be misremembering one random thread, but it's more than that. The count in my profile says 640 messages - but when I click on that for my post history, I only get 9 pages with 172 results. So there's quite a bit of other stuff unaccounted for.

IIRC, at one point the old forums were being kept up as a 'read only' archive. Is that still accessible anywhere? Or has all that content been consigned to The Eternal NUL:?

 

[Caluser2000]

Try Duck Duck Go or Bing...

 

[Robbbert]

Just checked mine, supposed to be 434 messages, but My Content only shows 160. There's a button for older content, but it finds nothing.

After writing this, checked again, still 160, with one random message (not the oldest one) having just vanished.

 

[NeXT]

I've noticed that for a while. I assumed that it's a bug from the forum update and the search string is broken and misses translating it when querying anything from the older iterations of the forum, kinda like how direct links to older posts are occasionally broken.

 

[doshea]

I found an issue with search, which I think could be closely related. In this case the post exists but search can't find it.

I remembered I'd read a post from one of the 8088 MPH folks which mentioned the DOS editor Aurora, so I searched for:

Keywords: aurora
Posted by: Trixter

but got "No results found.", so tried VileR, and also no results.

So then I searched for "dos editor" without any specific author, scrolled through lots of results and did find what I was looking for, from mid-November 2017:

I did an editor shootout many years ago but my focus was on editing speed on slow systems, not programmer's editors. That said, you might find something useful there, and you might also want to check out the Aurora editor which is ludicrously flexible.

A keyword search for just "Aurora editor" also returns "No results found.", so it seems the problem is not specifically in linking posts to authors, it's just posts missing entirely from the search index.

From looking at Trixter's post history (that link currently points to the relevant page of history, but I suspect that won't remain the case) it does include that period of time, but that specific post is missing:

Trixter
Setting an 80-column font in 320x200 modes
[...]
Trixter Post #7 Dec 24, 2017 Forum: Vintage Computer Programming

Trixter
Looking for advice on dealing with international shipping size limits
[...]
Trixter Thread Nov 26, 2017 Replies: 6 Forum: General Vintage Computer Discussions

Trixter
AT&T 6300 / Olivetti M24 mice alternative: Logitech P7-3F
[...]
Trixter Thread Oct 21, 2017 Replies: 6 Forum: PCs and Clones (XT and early AT class machines)

And it's not just that the forum containing the post I was looking for is not indexed, because it's in the "Vintage Computer Programming" forum which appears there in December.

A Google search for site:forum.vcfed.org "aurora editor" picks up that post and that post only, so I guess that's a workaround.

Does XenForo have a button like "Rebuild the search index (WARNING: THIS MIGHT TAKE FOREVER)"?

 

[whartung]

Does this forum use the advanced search addon from XenForo or the stock one (which isn't very good)?

At least they're letting Google crawl the site, many forums don't.